Biohazard and Pathogen Disinfection in Taos, NM

Taos is an incorporated town in north-central New Mexico and the county seat and largest municipality of Taos County.

The 2020 census counted 6,474 residents in Taos, living in 3,165 households.

Taos sits at an elevation of about 6,969 feet between the Rio Grande Gorge and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, roughly 50 miles south of the Colorado border.

The town takes its name from neighboring Taos Pueblo; "Taos" derives from the native Taos language and means "(place of) red willows."

Spanish colonists first founded the settlement as Don Fernando de Taos around 1615, but it was only intermittently occupied until Governor Fernando Chacón formally established it as a permanent fortified plaza settlement in 1795.

Just north of town, Taos Pueblo has been continuously inhabited for roughly a thousand years and was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992; it is a separate community from the town of Taos.

During the Taos Revolt of 1847, Hispano and Pueblo rebels opposed to the U.S. occupation killed the newly appointed American governor, Charles Bent, in his Taos home.

By long-standing tradition dating to the Civil War, when Kit Carson had guards protect it from Confederate sympathizers, the American flag flies day and night over Taos Plaza — one of the few places in the United States where the flag is displayed continuously.

Painters Ernest Blumenschein and Bert Phillips founded the Taos art colony in 1898, and the Taos Society of Artists followed in 1915; the town has since drawn artists including Georgia O'Keeffe and writer D.H. Lawrence.

Taos has more than 80 art galleries and three art museums — the Harwood Museum of Art, the Taos Art Museum, and the Millicent Rogers Museum — along with more than twenty sites on the National Register of Historic Places.