🇺🇸 United States · Southwest
Sedona is one of the most photographed places in Arizona: a town set among spectacular red rock formations that catch fire in the light of sunrise and sunset. Surrounded by canyons, mesas and red sandstone monoliths such as Cathedral Rock, Bell Rock and Coffeepot Rock, it offers a postcard landscape of the American Southwest that draws hikers, photographers and wellness seekers alike.
Beyond the scenery, Sedona is famous for its spiritual and 'New Age' reputation: people speak of energy 'vortexes' at certain points around the area, and the town is packed with retreats, spas, wellness sessions and art galleries. But you don't have to believe in the vortexes to enjoy it: the real draw is outdoors, with dozens of trails, off-road jeep rides over the red rock and corners like the Chapel of the Holy Cross, wedged into the cliff.
This guide covers the essentials of Sedona with a practical eye: which red rock trails and formations not to miss, what the famous jeep tours are like, where the vortexes and the chapel are, how to combine it with nearby Oak Creek Canyon and the Grand Canyon, and when to go to dodge the heat and the crowds. Sedona is, above all, a destination for looking at the landscape and walking among the red rock.
The red rock region was inhabited by ancient cultures such as the Sinagua, who left cliff dwellings behind (nearby Montezuma Castle and Palatki). The modern town was founded in the late 19th century and owes its name to Sedona Schnebly, wife of the first postmaster, who christened the place in 1902. In the mid-20th century Hollywood shot dozens of westerns in its landscapes, and from the late 20th century on it flourished as a destination for wellness, art and nature. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Grand Canyon state: land of the Navajo, Hopi and Apache, of the Sonoran Desert and its saguaros, of the thousand-year-old canals of the Hohokam, of copper and the Old West, and of legendary landscapes such as Monument Valley, Sedona and Antelope Canyon.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Before the red rock was a vortex, a postcard or a film set, it was a home. For thousands of years, Indigenous cultures lived among these red canyons: they left their hands painted on the stone, their granaries in the cliffs and a silence you can still feel at dawn, when the sandstone glows like an ember. The human history of Sedona begins long before its name.
The earliest groups were hunter-gatherers, but over time farming peoples settled here, using the water of Oak Creek and other streams to grow crops in an arid setting. The most prominent culture in the area was that of the Sinagua, which flourished in central Arizona roughly between the 7th and 15th centuries.
The Sinagua left a remarkable archaeological legacy around Sedona: dwellings and shelters in the cliffs, petroglyphs and rock paintings. Nearby sites such as Palatki and Honanki, with their cliff dwellings and rock art, or the more distant Montezuma Castle and Tuzigoot, in the Verde Valley, bear witness to a way of life adapted to the desert and the canyons.
By the 15th century, the Sinagua left the region for reasons still debated —droughts, exhausted resources, conflict— joining the pattern of migrations that affected many peoples of the Southwest. Their cultural descendants are linked to present-day peoples such as the Hopi and the Yavapai. When the first Euro-Americans arrived, the area was inhabited by the Yavapai and the Apache, who were displaced over the course of the 19th century.
The modern settlement began in the late 19th century, when Anglo-American settlers came to the valley drawn by the fertile land beside Oak Creek, where they established fruit orchards —apples and peaches above all— and ranches. Life was that of a small, isolated rural community, far from the main roads.
The town's name has a charming story behind it. In 1902, when the settlers applied to open a post office, the first postmaster was Theodore Carlton Schnebly, and a name was needed for the place. The proposals that reflected the geography (something like 'Schnebly Station') were too long for the postal stamp, so his wife's first name was chosen instead: Sedona Arabella Miller Schnebly. And so the town was christened with a woman's name, an unusual thing for a settlement.
Through the first decades of the 20th century, Sedona remained a quiet, sparsely populated farming and ranching community. Its spectacular red rock setting was admired by the few who came, but the town stayed on the margins of tourism and development. That would begin to change in the middle of the century, when Hollywood and, later, the wellness movement, discovered the potential of those landscapes.
From the 1920s onward and, more strongly, in the 1940s and 1950s, Sedona's red rock landscapes became the setting for countless films, above all westerns. The combination of red monoliths, clear skies and the dramatic light of the Southwest offered the perfect backdrop for the stories of cowboys, outlaws and Indians that Hollywood was turning out en masse.
Dozens of films were shot wholly or partly in the area, with the stars of the day, which gave Sedona early fame among American audiences who associated those unmistakable rocks with the Wild West of the screen. The movies helped put Sedona's name on the map and drew in the first curious visitors.
That film era is part of local lore and is still remembered in town. But Sedona's real tourism leap would come later, driven by something very different: wellness, spirituality and nature, which from the 1980s on would turn that quiet town of orchards and ranches into one of the most visited destinations in Arizona.
Sedona's great shift came in the last decades of the 20th century, when the town became a magnet for the 'New Age' movement and for wellness tourism. A key moment was the so-called 'Harmonic Convergence' of 1987, a spiritual event of worldwide reach in which Sedona was singled out as one of the Earth's sacred places. Around then the idea of the 'vortexes' took hold: points in the surrounding landscape where a special energy supposedly concentrates, favorable to meditation and healing.
That fame drew spiritual seekers, therapists, artists and wellness entrepreneurs, and the town filled up with meditation centers, yoga retreats, spas, art galleries, crystal shops and vortex guides. Sedona thus developed a very particular identity, a mix of nature destination, capital of southwestern art and spiritual mecca.
Today Sedona is one of the most visited places in Arizona, with several million visitors a year, which brings the challenge of managing the crowds, the traffic and the pressure on the trails and the environment. To ease it, services such as free shuttles to the most popular trailheads have been created. Beliefs about the vortexes aside, what sustains Sedona's pull is what it has always been: the overwhelming beauty of its red rock, which still catches fire at every sunrise and every sunset as it has for centuries.
The real protagonist of Sedona is not human but geological: those towers, bells and cathedrals of stone that are photographed millions of times a year are the record of a past almost 300 million years deep. The most famous layer, the one that gives Sedona its unmistakable color, is called —what a coincidence— the Schnebly Hill Formation, named by geologists after the same surname as the settlers who gave the town its name. It is a deep red sandstone, between 240 and 300 meters thick, laid down during the Permian period.
The secret of the color is simple and spectacular at once: the sand that makes up this rock contains iron, and that iron, exposed to oxygen for ages, rusted. Put another way, Sedona's rocks are literally rusted: iron oxide (hematite) stains the sandstone that rust red that burns in the raking light of dawn and dusk. It is the same process that rusts a nail left outdoors, but on the scale of an entire landscape and across millions of years.
Those sands were deposited some 278 million years ago, when this region was not a high desert but the shore of a shallow sea, on the edge of the supercontinent Pangaea. Tides came and went over coastal plains, piling up layer after layer of sediment. Later, the uplift of the Colorado Plateau raised the whole thing, and erosion by water and wind carved out over millennia the canyons, arches and monoliths —Cathedral Rock, Bell Rock, Coffeepot Rock, Devil's Bridge— that define Sedona's skyline.
Understanding this deep history changes the way you look at Sedona: every red wall is a page in a book of stone, and the layers of different color you can see in the formations (pale limestone on top, red sandstone in the middle) are chapters of a vanished ocean. The vortexes and the legends are recent; the rock has been here since long before there was any human being around to admire it.