Tucson

Top things to do in Tucson

1. 01

   Saguaro National Park - a giant cactus forest on both sides of town

   nature wildlife hiking scenic 👍 Popular

   The park comes in two separate districts, one against the Tucson Mountains west of the city and one under the Rincon Mountains to the east, and most visitors do both because they are genuinely different. The western half is the picture everyone has in their head: steep slopes packed shoulder to shoulder with saguaro, a gravel loop road through the thick of it, and a short climb at Signal Hill to a boulder field carved with Hohokam petroglyphs. The eastern half is older, taller and more spacious, with a paved loop drive, long desert trails and a back country that climbs into oak and pine on Mica Mountain. Saguaro grow nowhere but the Sonoran Desert, take half a century to put out a first arm and can stand for two hundred years, which is why the ones here are treated as protected residents rather than scenery.

2. 02

   Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum - zoo, botanical garden and desert crash course in one

   nature wildlife culture arts ⭐ Highly recommended

   Not a museum in any normal sense: a mostly outdoor campus in the Tucson Mountains west of the city where the whole Sonoran Desert has been assembled along walking paths, with mountain lions, javelina, prairie dogs, coyotes and bighorn in enclosures cut into the natural hillside, a walk-through hummingbird aviary, a mocked-up limestone cave, and a raptor free flight in the cool months where hawks and owls are released to fly low over the crowd. Go early in the day, when the animals are still moving and the light is good; it pairs naturally with the western half of the national park next door and with the sunset drive back over the pass.

3. 03

   Mission San Xavier del Bac - the White Dove of the Desert

   history culture arts 👍 Popular

   A blazing white Spanish Colonial church standing alone on the flat desert south of the city, on the San Xavier District of the Tohono O'odham Nation, and the finest building of its era anywhere in the United States. The mission was founded by a Jesuit missionary at an existing O'odham village at the end of the seventeenth century; the church you see went up under the Franciscans in the late 1700s, its brickwork rendered and lime-washed, its interior packed floor to dome with carved saints, painted vaults and folk-baroque colour that conservators spent years stabilising. It is still an active parish church for the community around it, so visits fit around services. Fry bread stands work the plaza outside, and a small hill opposite gives the classic view back at the towers, one of which was famously never finished.

4. 04

   Mount Lemmon and the Catalina Highway - cactus to conifer in an hour

   scenic nature wildlife hiking 👍 Popular

   The road up the Santa Catalinas is the single best drive in southern Arizona: about forty kilometres of switchbacks from the saguaro slopes on the city's northern edge to a village and a ski area near the top of a mountain approaching 2,800 m, passing through every life zone between Mexico and Canada on the way. Windy Point Vista is the pull-off everyone stops at, with hoodoos and granite fins and the whole valley grid laid out far below; higher up the highway runs through ponderosa and aspen where it can be twenty degrees cooler than the city, which is what makes this the local escape hatch all summer. Rock climbers work the roadside crags in winter, the ski area is the southernmost in the country and runs on whatever snow it gets, and the mountain village was largely rebuilt after a fire tore through in 2003.

5. 05

   Sabino Canyon - a desert canyon with water running through it

   hiking nature wildlife scenic

   A deep granite canyon cut into the Santa Catalinas on the north-eastern edge of town, with a creek that actually flows for much of the year and pools deep enough to swim in after the storms. Private cars are banned, so an electric shuttle runs the narrow road up the canyon over a string of low stone bridges and drops you to walk back down, which is the easy version. A second shuttle serves Bear Canyon and the popular trail up to the tiered pools at Seven Falls, and longer routes climb out of the canyon onto the range itself. Dawn and late afternoon are the times to go; deer, coati and the occasional bighorn come down to the water, and the canyon walls hold the heat late in the day.

6. 06

   Sonoran cooking - the reason this is a UNESCO City of Gastronomy

   food culture arts ⭐ Highly recommended

   Tucson was the first city in the United States given the designation, and the case rested on continuity: crops have been farmed on the Santa Cruz floodplain here for four thousand years, and heritage White Sonora wheat, tepary beans, mesquite flour and cholla buds still turn up on menus. In practice that means paper-thin flour tortillas stretched by hand, carne seca dried in the desert air, cheese crisps, birria, and the Sonoran hot dog, a bacon-wrapped dog buried in pinto beans, onion, tomato and jalapeno salsa inside a soft bolillo roll, perfected at El Guero Canelo and sold from carts across the south side. El Charro Cafe claims the longest unbroken run of any Mexican restaurant in the country and a hand in inventing the chimichanga; Barrio Bread put Tucson's heritage grain into loaves that won national awards. The densest eating is along South Fourth Avenue in South Tucson, a separate one-square-mile city entirely surrounded by the larger one.

7. 07

   Pima Air and Space Museum - hundreds of aircraft, and the boneyard over the fence

   history culture arts

   One of the largest aviation collections in the world, spread over open desert ground and a run of hangars on the city's south-east side: bombers, spy planes, presidential transports, airliners and oddities parked in rows, with a separate memorial museum to a bomb group inside the same site. Next door is the reason it is here, the military aircraft storage yard at the air force base, where thousands of airframes sit preserved in the dry air in ranks visible from the perimeter road. Bus tours from the museum onto the base have run for years and are at the mercy of base security, so treat them as a bonus rather than a plan. Allow far longer than you think; the outdoor sections need a hat and a serious amount of water outside winter.

8. 08

   Barrio Viejo - adobe rowhouses painted every colour there is

   history culture arts

   Just south of the convention centre lies one of the largest surviving concentrations of Sonoran adobe rowhouse in the United States: thick mud-brick walls flush to the footpath, deep-set windows, flat roofs and facades painted saffron, cobalt and rose. It is a quiet residential grid best walked in the early morning, and its silence has a cause, since the northern half of the old barrio was bulldozed in the late 1960s for the convention centre and a road scheme, displacing hundreds of Mexican-American families. At the edge of the demolition sits El Tiradito, a crumbling wall of melted candle wax and folded notes and the only shrine in the country dedicated to a sinner buried in unconsecrated ground.

9. 09

   Congress Street and Fourth Avenue - the two strips that hold the nightlife

   nightlife music shopping food

   Downtown's revival runs along a few blocks of Congress Street: a 1919 hotel with a lobby bar and a music room where John Dillinger's gang was captured after a fire in 1934, two restored 1920s theatres a block apart doing touring bands and film, and a run of cocktail bars, taco counters and record shops between them. Fourth Avenue is the scruffier, better sibling, a straight kilometre of vintage clothing, head shops, dive bars and student taquerias linking downtown to the university through a lit pedestrian underpass. The streetcar strings the whole thing together, which makes this the one corner of Tucson where an evening happens on foot.

10. 10

    Sentinel Peak and Mission Garden - where the city got its name

    history scenic food

    The dark basalt hill west of downtown is the black mountain in the O'odham name that became Tucson, and a road climbs most of the way up it to a view over the whole valley, with a giant whitewashed letter A on the slope, put there by students after a football win in 1916. At the foot of it, Mission Garden is a walled recreation of the Spanish colonial orchard on the site of the ancient village and its irrigated fields: heirloom quince, pomegranate and fig, White Sonora wheat, agave and a timeline of crops laid out plot by plot, which is the clearest explanation anywhere of why people never stopped farming this particular bend of a mostly dry river.

11. 11

    Tumamoc Hill - the evening walk the whole city does

    hiking scenic

    A steep paved road climbs a volcanic hill beside Sentinel Peak to a research station belonging to the university, and it doubles as Tucson's communal treadmill: a few hundred metres of ascent, a couple of kilometres each way, and a stream of locals walking it at dawn and dusk with the desert light doing its thing over the valley. The hill is an ecological reserve that has been under continuous study for more than a century, and its summit carries the terraced walls of a fortified village occupied more than two thousand years ago. Access hours are restricted around the research work, and there is no shade at all.

12. 12

    University of Arizona museums - Ansel Adams' archive and a room of Southwest pottery

    culture arts history

    The campus is a shaded grid of red brick and lawns a streetcar ride from downtown, and it holds more than its share of the city's collections. The Center for Creative Photography keeps the complete archive of Ansel Adams along with those of dozens of other major photographers, and will pull original prints out of storage for anyone who books ahead. The state museum next door holds the largest collection of Southwest Native pottery anywhere and the oldest continuously running anthropology programme in the region. A planetarium and mineral museum sit alongside, and the university's tree-ring laboratory, which invented the science of dating wood by its growth rings, was founded here on the back of the astronomy department.

13. 13

    Dark skies and big mirrors - Tucson as the world capital of astronomy

    culture arts nature wildlife

    The mountains, the dry air and one of the earliest outdoor lighting ordinances in the country, passed in the 1970s to keep the city dim for its observatories, made this the centre of gravity for optical astronomy. Under the university's football stadium, a mirror lab spin-casts the largest single telescope mirrors ever made, honeycombed inside and polished for years, and runs tours for anyone who wants to see one in the tank. Up on the mountain behind the city, a public sky centre runs evening programmes on a serious telescope, and the observatory ranges to the south and west sit dark enough that the Milky Way is a nightly event rather than a rarity.

14. 14

    Gates Pass - the sunset the whole city drives out for

    scenic

    A narrow road climbs west out of town over a saddle in the Tucson Mountains, and the far side opens onto an ocean of saguaro running down to the Avra Valley with nothing built in it. There are stone shelters and pull-offs at the top built by Depression-era work crews, and the ritual is to arrive an hour before sunset, watch the cactus shadows stretch out and stay for the afterglow. The grade is steep and tight enough that large vehicles are barred, it gets busy on clear winter evenings, and the same road is the direct way to the desert museum and the western half of the national park.

15. 15

    Tucson Gem, Mineral and Fossil Showcase - the whole city turns into a rock shop

    shopping culture arts

    Every February the largest gathering of its kind on earth takes over Tucson: dozens of separate shows in hotels, tents and car parks across the city, from container-loads of rough crystal sold by weight to museum-grade meteorites, dinosaur skeletons and fine jewellery, with the flagship mineral show at the convention centre wrapping it up. Dealers come from every continent, hotels along the interstate hand their rooms over to the trade, and traffic downtown becomes genuinely difficult. If you are visiting in February, book a bed early; if you have any interest in rocks, plan the trip around it.

16. 16

    Guest ranches and desert spas - the Tucson invention nobody credits it for

    wellness adventure

    Health seekers came to this desert for the dry air a century ago and the industry never left. Working guest ranches on both edges of the city still run rides out into the cactus, with horses, corrals and cookouts on the western fringe and old adobe compounds against the mountains to the east. The modern descendant is the destination spa, a format essentially invented here in the late 1970s, and the two best known in the country still sit on the northern edge of Tucson, selling week-long programmes of hiking, treatments and food rather than a room with a massage attached. Between them are foothill resorts with canyon views and pools, quieter and much better value than their equivalents up the interstate.

Getting to & around Tucson

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