Tucson

People have farmed beside the Santa Cruz River at the foot of Sentinel Peak for thousands of years. The Hohokam lived in the area from about AD 600 to 1450, building irrigation canals and making red-on-brown pottery, and the O'odham who followed named the place Cuk Ṣon, "the base is black", for the dark peak — the source of the city's name. In 1692 the Jesuit missionary Eusebio Kino came to the valley and founded San Xavier del Bac in a Sobaipuri O'odham settlement south of today's city.

In 1775 Hugo O'Conor authorised the walled Presidio San Agustín del Tucsón, the fort from which the city grew; the Apache attacked it repeatedly. After 1821 Tucson belonged to the Mexican state of Sonora, and it came to the United States through the Gadsden Purchase in the 1850s. The Civil War brought skirmishes between Union and Confederate cavalry. Tucson was capital of the Arizona Territory from 1867 to 1877 and was incorporated in 1877, the oldest incorporated city in Arizona. The railway brought Chinese workers, and in 1885 the territory founded the University of Arizona.

Tucson was Arizona's largest city until Phoenix overtook it between 1910 and 1920. It kept growing through the 20th century, reaching 37,000 people by 1940 and more than half a million today, but urban renewal destroyed one of its earliest barrios, leaving the adobe Fremont House as a survivor. Today it is the largest city in the lands of the Gadsden Purchase.

Tucson's identity rests on its blend of O'odham, Mexican, Spanish and Anglo-American roots and on the desert. About 42 per cent of residents are Hispanic, the Tohono O'odham Nation lies just west and south of the city, and Mexico is close enough that families and traditions move back and forth. The city is proud of its barrios, adobe houses and the white church of San Xavier, a working mission and pilgrimage site.

Festivals fill the cooler months. The gem and mineral shows of late January and February are among the largest in the world, the Fiesta de los Vaqueros rodeo follows in February, the Festival of Books is held at the university in March, and the International Mariachi Conference has brought hundreds of mariachi bands to the city each April since 1982. Tucson Meet Yourself celebrates the city's ethnic groups in October, and the All Souls Procession, begun by the artist Susan Kay Johnson in 1990, is now part of All Souls Weekend events that bring together more than 100,000 people downtown each November in memory of the dead.

The University of Arizona shapes much of the city's life, from its basketball and football teams to its poetry centre and its observatories; Tucson is a centre of astronomy, with Kitt Peak nearby and a university laboratory that casts giant telescope mirrors. The city has long been a filming location for Westerns, most of them made at Old Tucson, and the city has a lively music scene of punk bars, house venues and norteño music.

The 2020 census counted about 543,000 people in Tucson, the second-largest city in Arizona, and the metropolitan area has an estimated 1.08 million. Suburbs such as Oro Valley and Marana spread north-west, Sahuarita lies to the south, and the small city of South Tucson sits inside Tucson south of downtown.

The University of Arizona is the city's largest employer, and Davis-Monthan Air Force Base on the south-eastern edge provides many jobs; military families live in suburbs such as Rita Ranch. Defence and technology companies, Raytheon among them, have large operations here, the city is a hub on the Union Pacific railway linking the Los Angeles ports with the south and east, and the winter gem shows are one of its major annual attractions. About 18 per cent of residents live below the poverty line.

The heat sets the rhythm of the day for half the year: errands and exercise early, the hottest hours indoors, and evenings outside. Locals watch for the first monsoon storm each July, which brings humidity and brief flooding of main streets. At the end of the 2010s the city and its businesses began redeveloping downtown, and the Sun Link streetcar, opened in 2014, links the centre with the university.

In 2015 Tucson became the first city in the United States named a UNESCO City of Gastronomy. Its food heritage reaches back more than 4,000 years in the Sonoran Desert and draws on Hohokam and O'odham, Spanish, Mexican, Chinese and other traditions. Mission Garden, at the foot of Sentinel Peak, grows the heritage crops and fruit trees of those cultures.

Sonoran-style Mexican food is the city's everyday cooking: flour tortillas, carne seca (dried beef), carne asada tacos and chiles rellenos. Tucson has a strong but contested claim to have invented the chimichanga, a deep-fried burrito. A very popular street food is the Sonoran hot dog, sold at more than 200 places in the city by a 2009 estimate — a hot dog wrapped in bacon and grilled, served in a bolillo-style bun and topped with pinto beans, onions, tomatoes and condiments that often include mayonnaise, mustard and jalapeño salsa.

El Charro Café, opened in 1922 and still owned by the Flores family, is the oldest Mexican restaurant in the United States owned by the same family. South Tucson's family restaurants and the bars and cafés of Fourth Avenue and downtown complete the picture, and since 2022 a Chinese Chorizo Festival each October has invited cooks to create new dishes from a sausage that reflects the city's Chinese and Mexican heritage.