Phoenix

Top things to do in Phoenix

1. 01

   Camelback Mountain - the summit scramble everyone in the valley has done

   hiking adventure 👍 Popular

   A humped mass of red sandstone and granite rising straight out of the suburbs between Phoenix and Scottsdale, with two routes up: Echo Canyon from the north-west, short and brutally steep with handrails and pipe rails bolted to the rock steps, and Cholla from the east, longer and gentler at the start before the same scramble at the top. Neither is a walk, both need hands in places, and most people take a couple of hours return. The small car parks fill before sunrise all winter, and the city closes both trails when an extreme heat warning is in force - not a formality, since hauling people off this mountain is a routine part of the fire department's summer.

2. 02

   Desert Botanical Garden - the Sonoran Desert, arranged and labelled

   nature wildlife scenic 👍 Popular

   A bowl of red buttes in Papago Park holding one of the world's great collections of desert plants: saguaro stands, walls of agave and aloe, a wildflower trail that peaks in early spring, and a garden of the crops desert peoples have farmed here for centuries. The paths are paved and mostly flat, glass sculpture has been installed among the cactus in several celebrated exhibitions, and the garden stays open into the evening, which is when the creosote smells strongest and the light does the work. Winter nights lit by thousands of paper lanterns are a valley tradition.

3. 03

   Heard Museum - Native art of the Southwest, told by Native voices

   culture arts history ⭐ Highly recommended

   A Spanish Colonial Revival building of courtyards and low galleries holding one of the finest collections of American Indian art anywhere, built up since the 1920s and, unusually for a museum of its age, shaped with and by the peoples it represents. The permanent gallery on the Native cultures of the Southwest is the core; the exhibition on the government boarding schools that took children from their families is quiet, unsparing and the thing most visitors remember afterwards. The shop is effectively a jewellery and pottery gallery in its own right.

4. 04

   Musical Instrument Museum - headphones on, two hundred countries in an afternoon

   culture arts ⭐ Highly recommended

   Out on the northern edge of the city, a purpose-built museum with a display for almost every country on earth and a wireless headset that picks up the audio and video for whichever exhibit you walk in front of, so the building plays itself as you move through it. Downstairs is a room where you can bang, blow and bow the instruments yourself, and there is a small concert hall with an exceptional touring programme. It sounds like a specialist detour and is consistently the attraction visitors rate highest in the valley.

5. 05

   Taliesin West - Frank Lloyd Wright's desert camp in the McDowell foothills

   culture arts history 👍 Popular

   Wright bought raw desert here in the 1930s and had his apprentices build a winter studio out of the ground it stands on: rubble stone set in concrete, low canted walls, canvas roofs and rooms that frame the mountains like a viewfinder. It is still a working architecture school and is now inscribed on the World Heritage list. Tours are guided and need booking ahead; take a late afternoon slot, when the light does what the whole place was designed for.

6. 06

   South Mountain Park and Preserve - the valley lights from Dobbins Lookout

   hiking scenic

   One of the largest municipal parks in the country covers the whole range along the city's southern edge, big enough to hold well over a hundred kilometres of trail. A paved road climbs to Dobbins Lookout and its stone shelter, with the entire grid laid out below, which makes this the standard sunset drive. The National Trail runs the length of the ridge for hikers and mountain bikers, and Hohokam petroglyph panels sit along the eastern trails if you know where to look.

7. 07

   Papago Park - Hole-in-the-Rock, red buttes and a white pyramid

   nature wildlife history scenic

   A low cluster of wind-eroded sandstone buttes wedged between Phoenix, Tempe and Scottsdale, with a short scramble up into a natural window in the rock that the Hohokam used to track the seasons and everyone else uses to watch the sun go down. The zoo and the botanical garden both sit inside the park, fishing lagoons and flat easy trails fill the gaps, a white pyramid on a knoll holds the grave of the state's first governor, and the site served as a prisoner-of-war camp in the Second World War, remembered for a mass tunnel escape whose planners intended to raft to Mexico and found the riverbed dry.

8. 08

   Piestewa Peak - the other summit hike, straight up the steps

   hiking

   A steep climb of rock steps to a knuckle of a summit in the middle of the Phoenix Mountains Preserve, closer to the centre than Camelback and every bit as busy at dawn. It is a stair machine rather than a scramble, roughly an hour up for most people, with the whole valley opening out at the top. The mountain was renamed in 2003 for Lori Piestewa, a Hopi soldier from Arizona and the first Native American woman killed in combat in the United States military. The preserve around it holds gentler loops for anyone not in the mood for the stairs.

9. 09

   Roosevelt Row - murals, bungalows and the first-Friday crowds

   culture arts nightlife music

   A few blocks of downtown warehouses and old bungalows converted into galleries, bars, taco counters and coffee roasters, with commissioned murals on almost every wall and a monthly evening art walk that fills the streets with a genuinely large crowd. The art turns over constantly and so do the buildings, since the district sits under heavy apartment development, so the wall you photograph may not be there on your next visit.

10. 10

    Old Town Scottsdale - saloons on one street, contemporary galleries on the next

    shopping culture arts nightlife music

    The most walkable few blocks in the metro, where a preserved strip of timber western shopfronts and a sawdust-floored saloon sit around the corner from serious contemporary art galleries, a weekly evening gallery walk, a canal-side waterfront of restaurants and a museum of the American West. North of it lies a dense entertainment district that gets very loud very late, which matters mainly when you are choosing which end to book a hotel in.

11. 11

    Cactus League spring training - half of Major League Baseball in one valley

    culture arts

    Fifteen big-league clubs spend February and March in Greater Phoenix, playing at ten small stadiums close enough together that you can take in two games in a day. The parks are intimate, players sign along the rails, the grass outfield banks are the best seats in the house, and the whole thing happens in the best weather of the Phoenix year while the teams' home cities are still frozen. Tickets for the popular clubs go early, and the traffic around the Scottsdale and Mesa parks is the only real friction.

12. 12

    TPC Scottsdale and the desert courses - golf as the valley's second industry

    scenic

    Greater Phoenix has more than two hundred courses, most of them the desert-target kind where fairways are ribbons of green threaded between untouched cactus and boulder. The Stadium Course at TPC Scottsdale is the famous one: its par-three sixteenth is ringed by grandstands for the February tour event and becomes the loudest hole in golf, a stadium of tens of thousands where players get booed for missing the green. Winter tee times need booking a long way out; summer is when locals play, at dawn, for a fraction of the trouble.

13. 13

    Sonoran food - bacon-wrapped hot dogs, hand-stretched tortillas and fry bread

    food

    The valley eats Sonoran rather than Tex-Mex: paper-thin flour tortillas stretched by hand, carne asada off mesquite, machaca, and the bacon-wrapped hot dog buried in pinto beans, tomato, onion and jalapeno salsa inside a soft bolillo roll, an import from across the border that became an Arizona institution. Native fry bread is its own tradition here, served flat and piled with beans or dusted with sugar at a handful of long-running places. Add one of the most-praised pizzerias in the country in a converted brick building downtown and a wave of modern Southwestern kitchens, and Phoenix eats far better than its reputation suggests.

14. 14

    Dawn balloon flight over the north valley desert

    scenic adventure

    Ballooning works here for the same reason the desert is cold at night: still dawn air over open Sonoran Desert on the northern edge of the metro, where the ground below is saguaro and dry wash rather than housing. Flights lift before sunrise, drift for about an hour over ridges and cactus with the whole valley grid to the south, and land wherever the wind decides. It is a cool-season activity, and most operators stand down through the worst of the summer heat.

15. 15

    S'edav Va'aki Museum - the Hohokam platform mound the modern city was built on

    history culture arts

    The remains of a large Hohokam village sit under the airport flight path in east Phoenix: an earthen platform mound, a ball court, reconstructed pit houses and a cut section of the irrigation canals that watered this valley for a thousand years and were re-dug by settlers to found the modern city. The museum, long known as Pueblo Grande and renamed with the O'odham name for the site, explains that canal engineering better than anywhere else in Arizona.

16. 16

    Phoenix Art Museum - the largest collection in the Southwest, and the firefly room

    culture arts

    A cool white box on Central Avenue with strong Western American, Latin American, Asian and modern holdings, a wing of exquisitely detailed miniature period rooms, and a mirrored infinity room by Yayoi Kusama that draws a queue of its own. One weekday evening a week has long run on a pay-what-you-wish basis, which is when the local crowd turns up.

17. 17

    Resort spas under Camelback and the McDowells

    wellness

    People have been coming here for the dry air since the tuberculosis sanatoriums of the early 1900s, and the modern version is a spa industry with few equals in the country: desert-facing treatment rooms, outdoor hydrotherapy circuits under the mountains, adobe and rammed-earth retreats among the boulders north of Scottsdale, and a clinical wing that made the valley a destination for both cosmetic work and addiction recovery. Several of the big resorts sell day access to the pools and spa without a room, which is the cheap way into a very expensive world.

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