The Old Pueblo of the Sonoran Desert — where Mission San Xavier del Bac (the White Dove of the Desert, founded 1692, one of the finest examples of Spanish colonial baroque architecture in North America) stands in the Tohono O'odham Nation 14 km from downtown, Saguaro National Park's forests of 200-year-old cactus begin at the city's edge, the University of Arizona drives a research and culinary scene that earned Tucson the designation of UNESCO City of Gastronomy, and Mount Lemmon (9,157 feet) rises so dramatically above the 2,400-foot desert floor that you drive through five climate zones in 40 minutes
Tucson (555,000; metro 1.1 million) is Arizona's second city and the largest city in the Sonoran Desert biome — surrounded on all sides by mountain ranges (the Santa Catalina Mountains to the north, the Rincon Mountains to the east, the Santa Rita Mountains to the south, and the Tucson Mountains to the west) that give the city an encircled, basin quality unique among American desert cities. Founded in 1775 as Presidio San Agustín del Tucson, the city was under Spanish colonial, Mexican, and Confederate control before becoming US territory in 1853 (the Gadsden Purchase, the last major territor…
The Tohono O'odham (Desert People) and their ancestors have inhabited the Sonoran Desert for at least 4,000 years — the Hohokam people (approximately 300–1450 CE) built an extensive canal irrigation network across the desert that watered 200,000 acres, the most sophisticated pre-Columbian irrigation in North America, predating European contact by 1,000 years. The Spanish Jesuit priest Eusebio Kino established the Mission San Xavier del Bac in 1692 as part of the mission system extending from Mexico City through the Sonoran Desert — the current church (completed 1797) was built by Franciscans…