Arizona's Oldest Town, Tubac

Tucson gets the airport and the university, but Tubac has the better claim to the title of Arizona's founding city. The village you see today, a quiet adobe arts colony along the Santa Cruz River, sits atop the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the state, with roots going back to seventeen fifty-two.

The story of Tubac begins with a rebellion. In seventeen fifty-one, the O'odham people rose up against Spanish colonial rule in what became known as the Pima Revolt, killing more than a hundred settlers and missionaries. In response, the Spanish Crown authorized the construction of a military garrison, a presidio, to protect the Santa Cruz River valley. Presidio San Ignacio de Tubac was established in seventeen fifty-two with a garrison of about fifty cavalry soldiers. It became the first European fort in what is now Arizona.

Over the following decades a settlement grew around the presidio walls. By the seventeen sixties, forty families lived in the shadow of the fort. A printing press produced the first newspaper ever printed in what would become the state of Arizona. And then, on October twenty-third, seventeen seventy-five, a remarkable thing happened: Captain Juan Bautista de Anza marched out of Tubac with two hundred forty-five colonists, three hundred forty horses, a hundred and sixty-five mules, and three hundred two cattle, bound for the coast of California.

Anza's expedition traveled overland from Tubac to what is now San Francisco, where his lieutenant founded the presidio and mission that became that city. The colonists who marched out of this sleepy river valley were the founders of modern San Francisco.

The fort was eventually abandoned after the Gadsden Purchase shifted the border, but the site was preserved and became Arizona's first state park in nineteen fifty-eight. Underground excavations have exposed the original presidio foundations beneath what is now a small museum. You can stand over them through a viewing floor, looking down at walls built when George Washington was still a young man in Virginia.