The Sonoran South & the Borderlands
Saguaro desert, silver towns, and the border missions — Tucson under its sky-island ranges, Saguaro National Park, the Spanish missions at San Xavier and Tumacácori, and the mining towns of Tombstone and Bisbee, on Tohono O'odham land near the Mexico line.
This is the desert people mean when they say the desert — the Sonoran, the only one on earth where the saguaro grows, greener and more crowded with life than any desert has a right to be, ringed around Tucson by a dozen sky islands, forested mountains standing straight up out of the cactus. Saguaro National Park guards the giants on two sides of the city. The land is Tohono O'odham — the desert people — and Akimel O'odham before it was anything else, and their nation still straddles the line the United States and Mexico ran straight through in the 1850s.
The Spanish came up this valley first, and the missions are their durable mark. Father Kino rode into the O'odham village of Wa'k in 1692 and began the chain that became San Xavier del Bac — the White Dove of the Desert, its Baroque church finished in 1797 and still the parish of the Tohono O'odham who built it. Down the Santa Cruz stand the ruins of his Tumacácori, and the presidio the Spanish threw up at Tubac in 1752 after the O'odham rose against them. This is among the oldest continuously farmed ground in the country, and none of it was empty when the missions arrived.
The rest is silver and blood. When Ed Schieffelin found silver east of here in 1877, soldiers had told him the only thing he would find was his tombstone; he named the strike, and the town, for the joke. Tombstone boomed, staged its thirty-second gunfight near — not quite at — the O.K. Corral in 1881, and calls itself too tough to die. Bisbee dug copper out of the Mule Mountains until the open pit swallowed the hillside. And all of it happened on Chiricahua Apache ground: Cochise held these mountains, and Geronimo, until the wars ended in exile to Florida. The rhyolite spires of the Chiricahuas — the wonderland of rocks — still carry the people's name. Come for the cactus. The rest is written underneath it.
What to See in The Sonoran South & the Borderlands
6 places across the region, grouped by what they are.
Natural Areas
Historic Sites
Towns & Gateways
Architecture
Industry & Mining
Stories from The Sonoran South & the Borderlands
The Sonoran South & the Borderlands rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.
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