The Buell Children’s Museum: Pueblo’s Hands-On Hall of Fame

Most children’s museums are a room of plastic and a ball pit. The Buell is not that.

Tucked inside the Sangre de Cristo Arts and Conference Center in downtown Pueblo, the Buell Children’s Museum runs 12,000 square feet across two levels, with roughly 7,500 of that given over to interactive gallery space. It opened in 2000, and two years later it got the kind of recognition most regional museums never see.

In 2002, Child Magazine ranked the Buell Children’s Museum the number two arts-related children’s museum in the country. Second in the nation, out of a city of about 110,000 people, in a building most travelers drive past on their way to somewhere else.

It has been voted the best museum in Pueblo for more than a decade since, which locally is the harder title to hold.

What Makes It Different

The Buell’s whole premise is that art is not a subject you sit still for. Every gallery is built to be touched, climbed into, or made a mess in.

The Reilly Family Gallery carries rotating hands-on exhibitions, so what you find depends on when you come. A recent run, “Little Experiments & Big Discoveries,” put kids on electricity circuits, hologram building, balance scales, paper airplane engineering, stop-motion filmmaking and open-ended LEGO construction. It is STEAM in the honest sense: art and science treated as the same instinct.

Sensations is a multi-sensory room, and the one that tends to hold the youngest visitors longest.

The El Pomar Magic Carpet Theater is a real performance space, used for programming rather than as a screening closet.

Artrageous Studio is where the actual making happens. Bring clothes you do not care about.

The Buell Baby Barn is set aside for children under four, which is the detail that separates a good children’s museum from a frustrating one. Parents with a toddler and a seven-year-old have somewhere to put both.

That range is the point. The museum is built for independent exploration and family participation at the same time, so a six-year-old can run ahead while a two-year-old stays put in the Barn.

Visiting

Where: Inside the Sangre de Cristo Arts and Conference Center, downtown Pueblo, a block off the Historic Arkansas Riverwalk.

Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday, noon to 4 p.m. Closed Mondays.

Admission: Adults $12, children $10, military and seniors 65 and up $10, members free. Confirm current rates at sdc-arts.org before you go.

How long: Two to three hours is the sweet spot. Families with kids under six routinely burn a whole morning.

The thing people miss: your ticket puts you inside the Sangre de Cristo Arts Center, which runs its own galleries, performances and programming for adults. If one parent needs forty minutes of grown-up art while the other supervises the Artrageous Studio, that trade is available under one roof. Very few children’s museums can say that.

Pueblo Is Underrated and This Is the Proof

Pueblo takes a beating in Colorado’s tourism conversation, usually from people who have never stopped there. It is a steel town on the Arkansas River, it is the most Latino city in the state by a wide margin, and it has a cultural density that does not match its size or its reputation.

The Buell is the clearest evidence. So is what surrounds it.

The Historic Arkansas Riverwalk runs right outside, with boat tours, restaurants and a walkable downtown loop that did not exist thirty years ago.

Pueblo chile is a genuine agricultural product with a protected identity, not a marketing exercise. The Mirasol grown in the Arkansas Valley is thicker-walled and hotter than a Hatch, and Pueblo will fight you about it. Late summer is roasting season and the whole town smells like it.

The Colorado State Fair has run in Pueblo since the 1870s and still fills the last week of August into Labor Day.

Steel and rail history built this city, and the Steelworks Center of the West tells that story better than most industrial museums manage.

Our Pueblo town guide covers the rest of it, and Colorado’s mining history explains why a city grew here at all.

Build a Weekend Around It

Pueblo sits at a crossroads that makes it an unusually efficient base.

Cañon City, 45 minutes west. The Royal Gorge Bridge hangs 956 feet above the Arkansas, and The Winery at Holy Cross Abbey pours on the grounds of a 1925 Benedictine monastery. Our Cañon City guide has the full day.

Rafting the Arkansas. The river that runs through Pueblo is the most rafted in Colorado further upstream. See our complete guide to Arkansas River rafting.

Lake Pueblo State Park, ten minutes from downtown, is one of the busiest water-recreation destinations in the state and stays usable far later into fall than anything in the high country. It earns its spot among the best lakes in Colorado.

The Highway of Legends, south toward Walsenburg and Trinidad, is one of the least-driven scenic byways in Colorado and one of the most surprising.

Beulah, twenty-five minutes southwest, is a green mountain pocket that feels nothing like the plains it sits beside. See Beulah Valley.

Colorado Springs is 45 minutes north if you want more lodging options. Our guide to Pikes Peak and Colorado Springs covers the corridor, and the state parks near Colorado Springs fill out the outdoor side.

The Paint Mines, an hour and a half northeast near Calhan, are banded clay hoodoos that look like they belong in Utah. Our guide to the Paint Mines Interpretive Park has the details.

When to Go

Any month. This is an indoor museum, which makes it one of the few Colorado attractions immune to weather, and that is exactly why it belongs on your list.

The Buell earns its keep on the days a Colorado trip falls apart: an August afternoon when the thunderstorms roll in at two o’clock, a January day when the passes close, a shoulder-season week when half the mountain towns are shut for mud season. Pueblo is low, warm and open when the high country is not.

Late August pairs the museum with the Colorado State Fair and chile roasting season, which is the single best week to be in Pueblo.

December brings holiday programming at the arts center, which slots neatly into a broader Christmas in Colorado trip.

For the wider view, see our guide to the best time to visit Colorado.

The Short Version

A city that most Coloradans underestimate is home to a museum that a national magazine ranked second in the country for arts-focused children’s museums. It is open year-round, it costs less than a lift ticket for a family of four, and it sits inside a full arts center on a riverwalk in a downtown that has quietly become worth a weekend.

If you have kids and you have been driving past Pueblo, stop driving past Pueblo.