The desert megacity that grew faster than any other US city in the 20th century — where the Sonoran Desert's saguaro cactus forest surrounds a skyline of 1.6 million people, the James Beard Award-winning restaurant scene draws on Native American ingredients, and Sedona's red rocks are 115 miles north
Phoenix (1.6 million; metro 5.1 million) is the capital and largest city of Arizona and the fifth-largest city in the United States — the fastest-growing major US city for most of the 20th century, built almost entirely after 1950 on the desert floor of the Valley of the Sun. The city is surrounded by the Sonoran Desert, a biome unique in the world for its towering saguaro cacti (which can reach 12 metres and live 200 years, growing only in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona and Sonora, Mexico) — Saguaro National Park (140 miles south) and South Mountain Park (within Phoenix city limits, 16,500 ac…
The Phoenix area was settled by the Hohokam people (c. 300 BCE–1450 CE) who constructed one of the most sophisticated irrigation canal systems in pre-Columbian North America — approximately 800 kilometres of hand-dug canals that channelled water from the Salt River to farm the desert floor. The Hohokam abandoned the area around 1450 CE for reasons that remain debated (drought, conflict, or environmental collapse); the European-American city of Phoenix was established in 1868 by Jack Swilling, who recognised the agricultural potential of the Hohokam canal system and re-excavated the canals to…