🇺🇸 United States · Rocky Mountains
Telluride is one of the most beautiful and exclusive mountain towns in the United States, a former silver and gold mining outpost boxed in at the end of a spectacular canyon in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado, at around 2,660 meters of altitude. Ringed by peaks over 4,000 meters and crowned by Bridal Veil Falls, the tallest waterfall in Colorado, it keeps a picturesque main street of Victorian facades designated a National Historic District.
Its great draw is the skiing: the Telluride resort links the historic town with the modern settlement of Mountain Village by a free gondola, and offers terrain for every level in an overwhelming mountain setting. In summer, Telluride is famous for its festivals —film, bluegrass, jazz, hot-air balloons—, its hiking and an atmosphere that is relaxed and sophisticated at the same time.
This guide covers the essentials of Telluride with a practical eye: its historic Main Street, the skiing and the gondola linking the town with Mountain Village, the waterfalls and canyon trails, the celebrated festivals, how to reach this isolated corner and where to stay and eat. It is a destination for anyone after alpine nature, historic charm and an exclusive atmosphere far from the crowds.
Telluride was born in the 1870s as a mining camp after gold and silver were found in the San Juan Mountains, and it lived a spectacular boom in the late 19th century. In 1889 Butch Cassidy pulled off his first bank robbery here. It was also one of the first towns in the world to receive commercial alternating current, thanks to a pioneering hydroelectric plant. After the mining decline, the town was reborn in the 1970s with the opening of its ski resort, keeping its Victorian core almost intact. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Rocky Mountain state: land of the Ute, Cheyenne and Arapaho, of the ancestral ruins of Mesa Verde, forged by the gold and silver rushes, today a skiing mecca with Aspen and Vail and home to a fast-growing Denver.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
On 24 June 1889, a 23-year-old walked into the San Miguel Valley Bank of a mining town lost in the mountains of Colorado, made off with more than 20,000 dollars and fled on horseback toward the peaks. His name was Robert LeRoy Parker, but the world would know him as Butch Cassidy, and that was the first bank robbery of his career. The town was Telluride. Two years later, in those same mountains, one of the first lights in the world powered by alternating current transmitted over a distance would come on. Isolated, immensely rich and rough, Telluride was for half a century one of the most extraordinary places in the West, and it all started with gold.
Telluride was born of the mining rush that took hold of southwestern Colorado in the 1870s, when rich veins of gold and silver were discovered in the steep San Juan Mountains. Prospectors pushed into that remote, hard-to-reach canyon, above 2,600 meters of altitude, and founded a camp that soon became a bustling mining town. The settlement was officially incorporated as Telluride in 1878.
The town's curious name has been the subject of debate. The most widespread explanation links it to telluride, a compound of the element tellurium that sometimes accompanies gold ores, although in Telluride the gold did not particularly occur in that form. Another popular tradition, probably apocryphal, holds that the name comes from the warning 'to-hell-you-ride', for how dangerous and isolated the place was.
The mines in the surrounding mountains, such as the Smuggler-Union and the Tomboy, produced enormous quantities of ore and drew thousands of workers. By the end of the 19th century, Telluride was one of the most prosperous and most turbulent mining towns in Colorado, with its thriving Main Street, hotels, banks and an intense nightlife.
Two episodes fix Telluride's place in the history of the West and of technology. The first belongs to outlaw legend: on 24 June 1889, a young Robert LeRoy Parker, later known worldwide as Butch Cassidy, held up the San Miguel Valley Bank in Telluride along with his accomplices, making off with a considerable sum. It was his first major bank robbery and the start of a criminal career that would make him one of the most famous bandits in the United States.
The second episode matters far more to the modern world. In 1891, near Telluride, the Gold King mine started up one of the first commercial transmissions of alternating current (AC) in history. The Ames hydroelectric plant, conceived by L. L. Nunn with technology developed from the ideas of Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse, generated electricity and sent it several kilometers away to power the mining machinery, proving that alternating current was viable over long distances.
That experiment, contemporary with the great battles between Edison's direct current and the alternating current of Westinghouse and Tesla, was a milestone that helped open the way to the electrical system that powers the planet today, and it gave Telluride an unexpected leading role in the history of energy.
Like so many mining towns in the West, Telluride went through a long decline over the 20th century as the veins ran out and metal prices fell. The crash of 1893, which sank the value of silver, hit the region hard, and although gold and other metal mining carried on for decades, the gradual closure of the workings left the town almost empty by mid-century, with the population down to a few hundred inhabitants and a Main Street in decay.
That very isolation and stagnation are what saved the historic core: with no pressure to demolish and rebuild, Telluride kept its 19th-century Victorian architecture almost intact, which would later earn it designation as a National Historic District.
The rebirth came in 1972, with the opening of the ski resort, which gave the town a new calling in tourism. From then on, Telluride combined the appeal of its top-level skiing and its spectacular alpine setting with the charm of a perfectly preserved historic core. Festivals of film, bluegrass and other genres, which sprang up from the 1970s on, completed its transformation into one of the most exclusive and best-loved mountain destinations in the United States, where the mining past and modern life sit side by side at the head of a canyon crowned by waterfalls.
Behind Telluride's Victorian splendor there was also a history of exploitation and labor conflict that branded the town. On 4 May 1901, some 350 miners belonging to the Telluride Miners Union No. 63, part of the militant Western Federation of Miners, went on strike against the Smuggler-Union company, which was trying to impose a contract payment system ('fathoms') that in practice cut wages and dodged paying the eight-hour day at three dollars a day the miners were demanding.
The conflict escalated fast: the company brought in replacement workers (strikebreakers) protected by armed guards, and on 3 July 1901 a gunfight broke out between strikers and strikebreakers that left three dead. Union pressure, however, forced the company to give in that same month, recognizing the union and guaranteeing the eight-hour day, one of the first significant labor victories on that scale in mining in the American West.
The peace did not last. In November 1902 the manager of the Smuggler mine, Arthur Collins, was murdered, and his place was taken by Bulkeley Wells, an implacably anti-union engineer and investor who came to behave, according to his contemporaries, like an outright 'dictator' of San Miguel County. Under his command, the employers organized private militias, forcibly deported hundreds of unionized miners out of the state and unleashed violence that ran on until 1904, as part of the so-called Colorado Labor Wars, one of the harshest and least known chapters in American labor history. That past of workers' struggle, today almost invisible among the boutiques and restaurants of Main Street, is an inseparable part of the town's real history.