Tubac: Arizona's Oldest European Settlement

You are passing through the oldest European settlement in Arizona. The Royal Spanish Presidio of San Ignacio de Tubac was established in seventeen fifty-two, built after an O'odham uprising the year before had shaken Spanish authority in the Sonoran corridor. The fort's job was to shield the chain of Jesuit missions, including Tumacacori just to the south, from Apache raids.

Then in October of seventeen seventy-five, Tubac became the launching pad for one of the most ambitious land journeys in colonial North America. Captain Juan Bautista de Anza led two hundred forty colonists and hundreds of cattle, horses, and mules out of this valley on a twelve-hundred-mile overland march to California. They arrived near San Francisco the following spring, and Anza's lieutenant oversaw the founding of the city.

A century later, in eighteen fifty-nine, Arizona's first newspaper, The Weekly Arizonian, was printed here. And in nineteen fifty-nine, Arizona honored the presidio grounds by making Tubac home to the state's very first state park.