When you contribute to the Cortez Cultural Center and Hawkins Preserve, you are enhancing the lives of both locals and visitors from around the world. Our programs increase cultural understanding, promote the arts, and educate participants about history, diversity, and the natural environment.
We are a nonprofit 501.c.3 member-supported organization, originally founded in 1987. The mission of the Cortez Center Inc (DBA Cortez Cultural Center) is to provide programs that enrich the lives of our community and its visitors by increasing cultural awareness, promoting the arts, and educating about the area’s history, diversity and natural environment.
The Cultural Center hosts free cultural programs and art exhibitions year-round, and operates a gift shop that provides a marketplace for 30 local independent artists and makers. Our summer Native American Dance program attracts between 50 and 250 tourists to Cortez’s downtown commercial core every day.
The Cortez Cultural Center is the steward of Hawkins Preserve, one of Cortez, Colorado’s outdoor hidden gems that is free and open to the public from sun-up to sun-down, year-round. Over three miles of pedestrian and bicycle trails meander across ancient potholed sandstone slickrock formations, and through the Preserve’s 122 acres of densely forested piñon/juniper and sagebrush landscape. An ADA accessible concrete trail traverses across the northern reaches of the Preserve, while single track dirt paths lead to archaeological ruins and Dakota sandstone cliffs.
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