In Taos Pueblo, 1000-year-old mud houses with propane and mobile wifi

Now, a lifestyle imposed by circumstance not choice?

Photo: Rashmee Roshan Lall

Visiting the Taos Pueblo takes you back in time. Supposedly a thousand years but certainly to a time when electricity and running water were very far from human imagination, conception and execution. To a time when people lived in mud houses without doors and windows and a hole in the roof was their only exit and entry point.

The Red Willow Creek people who live in this pueblo (Spanish for village) an hour and a half outside New Mexico’s capital Santa Fe, describe themselves as “the only living Native American community designated both a World Heritage Site by UNESCO and a National Historic Landmark”.

In visiting it, I was transported back to another time — in my life. Or rather to two other times — 2018 and the early-to-mid 1990s.

In 2018, I spent a few days in Matmata, the Berber town in southern Tunisia, where some of the locals still live the way their ancestors did, in mud houses. Unlike the people of the Taos Pueblo though, Matmata was traditionally troglo…