Tubac Presidio State Historic Park

This valley was long the homeland of the O'odham peoples, and the Santa Cruz River made it a corridor of farms and villages for centuries. In the late 1600s the Jesuit missionary Father Eusebio Kino traveled the valley, and Spanish settlement followed. After an O'odham uprising in 1751, Spain established the Tubac presidio the next year, a garrison of soldiers meant to protect settlers and missions along the frontier and to guard against Apache raids.

From Tubac in 1775 and 1776, the captain Juan Bautista de Anza led an expedition of soldiers, settlers, and livestock all the way overland to the coast of California, where the group would go on to found San Francisco. That route is remembered today as the Anza National Historic Trail, part of which runs right along the river below the park. Tubac passed from Spanish to Mexican to American hands, boomed briefly with silver mining, and settled into the quiet valley town it is now, but the presidio ground remains its oldest and deepest layer.

The park's most memorable feature is underground. Rather than simply describe the vanished fort, archaeologists excavated a section of it and built a shelter over the dig, so visitors walk down into the earth to see the real foundations of the presidio, the adobe wall bases and packed floor laid by Spanish soldiers more than two and a half centuries ago. It is a rare chance to look at the actual bones of an eighteenth-century frontier fort rather than a reconstruction.

Above ground the story continues in a museum housed in part in historic buildings, with exhibits on the Spanish, Mexican, and territorial eras and a print of an early Arizona printing press. Nearby stands the 1885 territorial schoolhouse, one of the oldest surviving in Arizona, still fitted with its wooden desks, slates, and potbellied stove, a vivid picture of frontier education. The shaded grounds tie it all together in an easy, unhurried visit.

Just beyond the park gate lies the reason many people come to Tubac at all: a village of galleries, studios, and adobe shops that has grown into one of the Southwest's best-known small arts colonies. Painters, potters, weavers, and metalworkers fill the historic streets, and the mix of Spanish colonial and Southwestern styles gives the place a distinctive, low-slung charm. The park and the village complement each other, one the deep history and the other the living culture that grew from it.

The setting helps. Tubac sits in the green heart of the Santa Cruz Valley, where the river supports a corridor of cottonwoods and willows unusual in the desert. Walking the streets between adobe walls, with the Santa Rita Mountains rising to the east, it is easy to feel the long continuity of this place, a valley that has been farmed, defended, painted, and loved for a very long time.

The Santa Cruz River, though often quiet, sustains a rare ribbon of riparian habitat through the desert, and the Anza trail along it is a favorite of birders. The cottonwood galleries draw a remarkable variety of birds, including vermilion flycatchers flashing scarlet in the branches, gray hawks that nest in the tall trees, and a wealth of migrants passing through in spring and fall. Deer and javelina move through the brush, and the river bottom is cool and green even when the surrounding hills are parched.

The mildest and best months run from fall through spring, when the valley is comfortable and the birding is at its peak. Summer brings the monsoon storms that green the desert and swell the river, though the afternoons turn hot. Whatever the season, the pairing of deep history, living art, and green river valley makes Tubac feel like a place where several Arizonas overlap in one small, walkable spot.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.