To install a different version of Python: **required conda create -n py27 python=2.7 conda create -n py34 python=3.4 conda create -n py36 python=3.6 where py36 is the [env] name that will be created, python=3.6 specifies the python version to use in this [env] If you do conda create -n py27 python=2.7 anaconda where anaconda is the meta-package that includes all packages. This will essentially install ALL python packages, which can take up to 1 hour (and lots of disk space). Also I have observed errors that after such installation, the package manager seems making mistake re-setting wrong python version, i.e. resetting python 3.6 to 2.7, which is annoying. So this is not recommended!