For most of the year, the building at 1701 Mountain Road NW is a place where children are encouraged to touch everything: to crank the handles, turn the valves, launch the balls, and climb aboard a bicycle that pedals along a wire high above the exhibit floor. On the last Saturday in October, Explora Science Center & Children's Museum lets that same instinct loose on Halloween. Explora-ween runs Saturday, October 31, 2026, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., filling the museum with spook-tacular activities, eerie-sistible sweet treats, and mad-scientist experiments that the museum describes as simply bewitching. A costume contest caps the day, with a monster of a prize for the winner.
The event is a natural fit for a science center whose entire identity is built on the idea that discovery should feel like play. Explora's name is the imperative form of the Spanish verb explorar — to explore — and the museum has carried that command through decades of Albuquerque history. Its story began around 1983, when two separate groups in the city arrived at the same idea at roughly the same time: that Albuquerque needed a hands-on science center for children. Those efforts converged, and a decade later, in 1993, Explora Science Center opened its doors in the First Plaza Galleria in Downtown Albuquerque.
From there the museum began a peripatetic life, moving first to the Sheraton Old Town and then to Winrock Center before finally settling at its current home on Mountain Road, just up the road from the historic plaza of Old Town Albuquerque. Along the way it grew into a 20,000-square-foot, two-floor exhibition space holding more than 250 interactive exhibits spanning science, technology, and art — a collection that includes a laminar flow fountain, an experiment bar where concoctions get mixed and mysteries unraveled, an arts and crafts area, and the high-wire bike that has become something of a rite of passage for Albuquerque schoolchildren.
That institutional history matters for understanding what Explora-ween actually is. This is not a haunted house bolted onto a museum lobby, nor a trick-or-treat trail through a parking lot. It is the museum's own pedagogy — inquiry-based, hands-on, slightly messy — turned toward the one holiday that rewards exactly those qualities. Mad-scientist experiments are, in a sense, what Explora does every day; on Halloween they simply get to wear lab coats and cackle. The sweet treats are the concession to tradition, and the costume contest is the invitation to arrive in character.
Explora has also built a reputation for thinking carefully about who its visitors are. The museum runs dedicated sensory-friendly hours on select dates, with limited attendance, advance ticket reservations, sensory kits stocked with noise-reduction headphones, fidget objects, timers, and social stories, plus reduced noise and light and an additional calming space for sensory breaks. For families who find Halloween's fog machines and jump-scares difficult, that institutional habit of accommodation is worth knowing about when planning a holiday visit.
Explora is a member of the Association of Science-Technology Centers, and in 2013 it helped host the organization's annual conference in Albuquerque alongside the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science and the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History — a reminder that the museum near Old Town is a serious institution that happens to be built for eight-year-olds.
Practical details for Explora-ween are worth checking before the day itself. The museum asks visitors to reserve tickets in advance, and admission is ticketed rather than free; the museum's events page is the place to confirm current pricing and availability, since the published listing does not spell out the cost. The costume contest prize has likewise not been detailed publicly beyond the museum's promise of something monstrous. What is clear is the shape of the day: three hours of experiments, sugar, and costumes inside a building that has spent decades teaching Albuquerque's children that the best way to learn something is to get your hands on it.
Explora is located at 1701 Mountain Road NW, Albuquerque, NM 87104, near Old Town. For more information, the museum can be reached at (505) 600-6072 or by email at [email protected].