Scottsdale

The Hohokam farmed the Salt River valley for centuries, digging canals that later settlers reused, and the Akimel O'odham and Piipaash (Maricopa) peoples lived along the rivers when Americans arrived. The Salt River Pima–Maricopa Indian Community, created in 1879, still borders the city to the east. The Arizona Canal, dug in the 1880s, carried river water north of Phoenix and made farming possible on the desert where Scottsdale now stands.

In 1888 Winfield Scott, a retired army chaplain, bought 640 acres beside the canal and farmed them; the settlement that grew up around him took his name in 1894. For decades it was a small farming community, with a cotton boom during the First World War. From the early 1900s artists, writers and winter visitors came, the area's first resort opened nearby in 1909, and in 1937 Frank Lloyd Wright began building Taliesin West in the foothills to the north-east.

After the Second World War, air conditioning and new residents transformed the town. Scottsdale was incorporated in 1951 with about 2,000 people and called itself "The West's Most Western Town", promoting a Western image. Annexations spread it north across the desert. After a major flood in 1972 the city turned the flood-prone Indian Bend Wash into a 12-mile green belt of parks, and in 1995 voters approved a sales tax to buy the land that became the McDowell Sonoran Preserve.

Scottsdale's identity mixes the Old West with modern luxury. Old Town keeps its Western-themed storefronts and its museum of the West, while the galleries of Main Street and Marshall Way sell paintings, sculpture and jewellery, and the big winter horse shows and car auctions draw crowds from across the country.

Architecture is a point of pride. Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West is the headquarters of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, and Paolo Soleri, who settled in Scottsdale in 1956, built his earth-cast studios at Cosanti and designed the pedestrian bridge over the canal. The city is known for its public art, its resorts and spas, its golf courses and its spring-training ballparks, which turn February and March into a long festival of baseball.

The population is affluent and older than average, with many winter residents, but Old Town also has the busiest nightlife in the Phoenix area, popular with young visitors. Manners are relaxed and polished: casual clothes are fine almost everywhere, and service is attentive.

About 240,000 people live in Scottsdale, part of a metropolitan area of nearly five million around Phoenix. Tourism is a major industry, alongside health care — the Mayo Clinic has a large campus in the north of the city — financial services, technology companies and corporate offices. About a fifth of residents are 65 or older, and the city swells in winter.

South Scottsdale has older, modest houses and long-time residents; the centre has planned communities around golf courses and lakes; the north is newer, wealthier and spread into the desert, with gated estates and resort-style shopping. Commuting is almost entirely by car on wide roads and freeways.

The climate shapes the day: in summer people walk, run and hike before sunrise and stay indoors through the afternoon, and many wealthier residents leave for cooler places. Water supply, the pressure of new housing on the desert and the pace of growth are recurring local debates.

Scottsdale's food scene is broad rather than distinctive, but it draws on Arizona's Mexican and Native kitchens. Sonoran-style Mexican food — carne asada, machaca (dried, shredded beef), flour tortillas, chimichangas and tamales — is everyday fare, and the Sonoran hot dog, wrapped in bacon and piled with beans, onions, tomatoes and salsa, has come north from Hermosillo and is popular in Tucson and Phoenix. Prickly pear fruit turns up in syrups, sweets and margaritas.

Native frybread, eaten with honey and powdered sugar or turned into a taco with beans and meat, is found at festivals and stands run by members of nearby communities. The Western side of the city's identity shows in steakhouses and barbecue, many of them in and around Old Town.

Resort restaurants and Old Town's dining rooms follow national trends, with many chef-led restaurants, brunch places and patios. Arizona citrus appears on menus, and farmers' markets sell local produce through the cooler months.