Living
Why Tucson Is the Best Town in the Southwest
Most of the American Southwest has been made cute.
Sedona is a wellness mall with red rocks behind it. Scottsdale is a strip of resorts pretending the desert isn't there. Santa Fe has been operating at full theme-park for thirty years — the adobe is real, but the prices are not, and the city's been priced out of itself.
Tucson is the one that didn't go that way. It's still a real city, on real ground, with real food and real architecture and real weather. And it's the best town in the Southwest because of it.
I lived there for five years. I'm telling you this from inside the place.
The geography is the point
Tucson sits in a basin surrounded by four mountain ranges — the Catalinas to the north, the Rincons to the east, the Santa Ritas to the south, and the Tucson Mountains to the west. The city floor is at 2,400 feet. Mt. Lemmon, an hour up the highway, is at 9,000.
That means you can leave the desert in the morning, eat a sandwich in a pine forest by lunch, and be back at sea-level desert dust by dinner. There is nowhere else in North America where you can do that without crossing a state line. It's called a sky island, and Tucson has the best one in the country.
It's also the only major U.S. city with two units of a national park flanking it — Saguaro National Park East and Saguaro National Park West. The forty-foot saguaros that everyone thinks of when they think of "the desert" mostly grow there. Not in Phoenix. Not in California. Here.
That geography is not a backdrop. It's the entire reason the city is calmer, slower, and more grounded than the alternatives.
The food is in a different league
Tucson is a UNESCO City of Gastronomy. The first one in the United States. That's not a marketing line — it's a designation given in 2015 based on the city's continuous, four-thousand-year history of agriculture in a single basin.
Practically, that translates to:
- The best Sonoran-style Mexican food in the country, full stop. El Charro Café has been operating continuously since 1922 — the oldest family-owned Mexican restaurant in the U.S. — and it's still good.
- Sonoran hot dogs, which are a distinct, regional thing — bacon-wrapped, in a soft roll, with pinto beans, tomato, onion, mustard, mayo, jalapeño salsa. El Güero Canelo and BK Tacos are the two arguments worth having about who does it best.
- Mesquite flour, chiltepin peppers, tepary beans, prickly pear — all native ingredients that Tucson restaurants actually use, not just put on a tasting menu in air quotes.
- Tito & Pep, Tumerico, Café Poca Cosa, Downtown Kitchen + Cocktails — restaurants that would be lined up around the block in any other city, and in Tucson have a normal-sized waitlist on a Friday.
The food in Santa Fe is good. The food in Scottsdale is fine. The food in Tucson is the actual thing the rest of them are imitating.
The architecture didn't get scrubbed
Walk through Barrio Viejo on a Sunday morning. The adobe is original — some of those houses are 150 years old — and they're painted in pastels that have aged into the dust around them. It's the only neighborhood like it in the U.S.
El Presidio, the original Spanish-fort district downtown, is still intact. So is Armory Park. So is the older portion of Sam Hughes, the neighborhood next to the university, where 1920s bungalows sit under jacaranda trees that bloom purple in April.
Mission San Xavier del Bac — fifteen minutes south of downtown — is one of the most striking buildings in North America. White stucco, hand-painted Spanish Baroque interior, finished in 1797, still in use. There is no equivalent within a thousand miles.
Tucson's architecture wasn't preserved by a tourism board. It just never got demolished. That's the difference between a real city and a curated one.
The light
This is the part that's hard to argue and impossible to deny. The desert light in Tucson — particularly the late-afternoon light from October through March — is the best in the country.
Photographers know this. The University of Arizona's photography program is consistently in the top ten in the U.S., partly because the light is free and abundant. Painters know it. The Sonoran Desert has produced more landscape painters per capita than almost anywhere outside Provence.
In monsoon season, July through September, the afternoon storms come in like a curtain — full lightning, dust walls, twenty-degree temperature drops in fifteen minutes — and then the sky clears and the light turns gold for an hour. You stand on a porch and watch it. There's nothing else to do.
The pace
Tucson runs slower than Phoenix. It's two hours by car, but a different metabolism entirely. Phoenix is built on growth. Tucson is built on staying.
People walk in Tucson. They eat outside most of the year. They keep saguaros in their yards instead of lawns. The university gives it intellectual ballast without the LA-or-NYC neuroticism. There is no entertainment industry. No tech industry to speak of. Just a city that's been a city for a long time, doing what cities do, in good light, on good ground.
What I actually do there
- Coffee at Exo or Presta in the morning
- A drive up Mt. Lemmon when the city gets to 100°
- Dinner at Tito & Pep, then a walk through Sam Hughes
- Sabino Canyon at sunrise on a Saturday
- A Sonoran hot dog at El Güero Canelo when nothing else will do
Five things, none of them expensive, all of them only available there.
The other towns in the Southwest will sell you a version of the desert.
Tucson is the desert.