🇺🇸 United States · Southwest
Tucson is Arizona's second city and one of the most singular in the American Southwest: a desert metropolis embraced by five mountain ranges and surrounded by forests of saguaro cactus, the giant icon of the Sonoran Desert. Unlike the more touristy Arizona, Tucson keeps a deeply Latino, borderland air, the fruit of its Spanish and Mexican past, and it was named a UNESCO City of Gastronomy, the first in the United States.
The great natural draw is Saguaro National Park, split into two districts on either side of the city, where you can walk among cactuses several meters tall and centuries old. Add to that the extraordinary Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum —half zoo, half botanical garden—, the Spanish colonial missions such as San Xavier del Bac, and a vibrant Mexican culture you can feel in the food, the music and the festivals.
This guide covers the essentials of Tucson with a practical eye: how to see the saguaros and the Sonoran Desert, which museums and missions to visit, where to eat the best Mexican-Sonoran food in the country, how to get around the city and its mountain surroundings, and when to go to dodge the heat. Tucson is a gateway to the real Southwest, where the desert, the Hispanic legacy and western culture mix at every turn.
The Tucson valley was inhabited by Native peoples for thousands of years, especially the Tohono O'odham and, earlier, the Hohokam, who built irrigation canals. In 1775 the Spanish founded the Presidio San Agustín del Tucsón, which makes it one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the country. It was part of New Spain, then of Mexico, and passed to the United States with the Gadsden Purchase in 1854. That Hispanic, Native and cowboy heritage defines its identity today. 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.
Read the history of Arizona →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
At the foot of a hill of black volcanic rock, beside a river that today runs dry almost all year, there is a patch of ground where someone planted corn more than 4,000 years ago, and where the planting has never stopped since. It is one of the oldest sites of continuous agriculture in all of North America, and it sits minutes from downtown Tucson. That depth —millennia of people sowing in the desert— is the key to understanding why this Arizona city, so Latino and so Native, ended up being the first City of Gastronomy UNESCO named in the United States.
Tucson's history runs far deeper than that of any colonial city: the valley of the Santa Cruz River, where the city stands today, has been continuously inhabited for thousands of years, which makes Tucson one of the places with the longest human occupation in the United States. Archaeological digs around 'A' hill (Sentinel Peak) have turned up traces of early agriculture that are among the oldest in present-day American territory.
Among the peoples who left a deep mark are the Hohokam, a culture that flourished in the Sonoran Desert and stood out for its hydraulic engineering: they built extensive canal networks to irrigate corn, beans and squash in an arid setting, proving that the desert could sustain farming communities. The Hohokam declined before the Europeans arrived, leaving behind the remains of villages and platforms.
The Hohokam were followed by the O'odham peoples, in particular the Tohono O'odham ('desert people') and the Akimel O'odham ('river people'), the cultural descendants of that tradition. The city's own name comes from an O'odham word, 'Chuk Shon', referring to the dark base of Sentinel Peak. To this day the Tohono O'odham Nation holds a reservation south of the city, where the San Xavier mission stands, and its culture, its language and its cooking remain a living part of Tucson's identity.
The European presence in the valley began in the late 17th century with the Jesuit missionary Eusebio Francisco Kino, who traveled the region known as the Pimería Alta evangelizing the O'odham peoples and founding missions. He began the mission of San Xavier del Bac, south of present-day Tucson, whose splendid baroque church —the 'White Dove of the Desert'— would be finished at the end of the 18th century and is today one of the great colonial monuments in the United States.
The city's founding milestone came in 1775, when the authorities of New Spain established the Presidio San Agustín del Tucsón, a military fort meant to protect the viceroyalty's northern frontier against Apache attacks and to shore up Spanish control of the region. The settlement that would give rise to the city grew around that presidio. That is why Tucson claims to be one of the oldest European-founded cities in the Southwest.
Life on that frontier was hard: the presidio was a remote outpost of the empire, exposed to Apache raids and dependent on the nearby missions and ranches. The culture forged there —Hispanic, Catholic, cattle-raising and mixed with the Native peoples— laid the foundations of the Latino identity Tucson keeps to this day, far more pronounced than in other cities of the American Southwest.
When Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821, Tucson became part of Mexican territory, an outpost in the north of the young country. Through those decades it remained a small frontier settlement of Hispanic roots, far from the great centers of power and always in tension with the region's Apaches.
The decisive change came in 1854 with the Gadsden Purchase (the Venta de La Mesilla), a treaty by which Mexico sold the United States a strip of territory south of the Gila River, in what is today southern Arizona and New Mexico. Tucson thus found itself, almost overnight, on American soil, though its population and its culture were still overwhelmingly Mexican. The formal handover took place in 1856.
Under American sovereignty, Tucson lived through a turbulent period during the Civil War —it was briefly the Confederate capital of the Arizona Territory— and, above all, growth tied to the arrival of the Southern Pacific railroad in 1880, which connected it to the rest of the country. The city was capital of the Arizona Territory for a time and, although it later gave up that role to Phoenix, it consolidated its position as the center of southern Arizona. The mix of Mexican, Native and Anglo-American forged in those years is still Tucson's hallmark.
The 20th century turned Tucson from a frontier town into a university and science city. The University of Arizona, founded in 1885, became the engine of the local economy and culture, with a strong reputation in astronomy —helped by the clear desert skies and the observatories in the nearby mountains, such as Kitt Peak— and in desert studies. The dry, sunny climate also drew, from early on, people seeking treatment for respiratory illnesses, and later retirees and winter visitors.
The Second World War and the Cold War left a heavy military mark: Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, with its famous 'aircraft graveyard' (the Boneyard) where thousands of aircraft are stored in the dry desert air, became an emblem of the city. The population grew fast in the second half of the century, driven by air conditioning, which made the desert summer more livable.
In 2015, UNESCO named Tucson a City of Gastronomy, the first in the United States, in recognition of its long farming tradition in the desert, its O'odham and Mexican culinary heritage and the vitality of its current food scene. That title sums up the Tucson of today rather well: a city that embraces its desert, Hispanic and Native identity, and that has turned centuries of frontier history into one of its greatest attractions.