Luminaria festival at Cliff Palace in Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado

Luminaria festival at Cliff Palace in Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado

Time and human interference had taken its toll on Cliff Palace. The Ancestral Puebloan city, abandoned by the tribe around 1300 AD, was carefully cleaned up and even rebuilt a little recently. So when US national park rangers re-opened the site to the public in 2015, they celebrated with a luminaria display in Cliff Palace. The paper lanterns—a Christmas tradition started by Spanish explorers here who’d seen Chinese paper lanterns and adopted the idea—perhaps give Cliff Palace a bit of the firelight charm it had during the era of the Ancestral Pueblo people.