From Green Valley you can see a white marble cliff on the Santa Rita Mountains, the “white scar” that gave the range its name. This map prints the Joyner-Green Valley Library, the Community Performance & Art Center, the Green Valley Recreation Canoa Ranch Center, the Green Valley Recreation East Center, Desert Meadows Park and Continental Elementary School, with the Santa Cruz River running past them.
Green Valley is an unincorporated community and census-designated place in Pima County, on the western side of the Santa Cruz River.
KNOWOL made this map in 2026 and gave it the look of an old atlas. The shaded relief of the landscape comes from United States Geological Survey elevation data, and the streets were drawn from Census Bureau files. Green Valley is twenty miles south of Tucson and 40 miles north of Nogales, Sonora. It covers 26.3 square miles, and 22,616 people lived here at the 2020 census.
A retirement community of 59 associations
Green Valley is a retirement community made up of 59 homeowner associations, surrounded by copper mines and close to the cycling, hiking and birding country of the Santa Rita Mountains. Pima County provides most of its government services. The Green Valley Council, a community association, speaks for the community to the county, and a second association, Green Valley Recreation, runs its recreation; its Canoa Ranch Center and East Center both have their places on the sheet. The Santa Rita Fire District serves Green Valley and neighboring Sahuarita.
The biggest mines nearby are Freeport-McMoRan’s Sierrita Mine and ASARCO’s Mission Mine. The Sierrita Mine is in Green Valley, and it’s one of the community’s largest employers and invests in the community. The area’s big water users and utilities all pump from the same aquifer. In 2007 Pima County reported that the Green Valley area didn’t have a sustainable water supply at the pumping rates of the time. Since 2007 the Upper Santa Cruz Providers and Users Group has worked to bring every local water user, including the Town of Sahuarita, to the same table, and it has joined the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to lay the groundwork for bringing Colorado River water from the Central Arizona Project canal.
The river and the mountains
The Santa Cruz River, the Río Santa Cruz or “Holy Cross River,” runs about 184 miles from the San Rafael Valley into Sonora and back north, past Tubac, Green Valley, Sahuarita and Tucson to the Gila River. Most of the river is usually a dry bed unless the area gets significant rain. Across the river to the east lies Continental, founded in 1916 when President Woodrow Wilson asked the Intercontinental Rubber Company to grow guayule, a plant that can be made into rubber, in case the German navy cut off rubber imports from the Far East. The guayule project ended after World War I, and in 1922 Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands bought the farm and rented the fields to cotton farmers until 1949. In 1948 R. Keith Walden brought his Farmers Investment Company from California and made the Continental Farm his headquarters, and in 1965 he switched from cotton to pecans. The Walden family’s orchards together form the largest pecan grove in the world. Green Valley is in the Continental Elementary School District, which runs from kindergarten through eighth grade.
Click to explore a larger preview. The digital watermark does not appear on printed maps.
Names on this map
These names are printed on this map.
Streets and roads: W Duval Mine Rd, W Continental Rd, Mission Rd, W Duval Rd, Stronghold Canyon Ln, Continental Rd, E Continental Rd, N Campbell Ave, Old Nogales Hwy, Campbell Rd, E Page Mill Dr, E Quail.
More street names, A to Z
Blm Rd, Cam de Vida, Canyon Ln, Canyon Rd, E Madera Plateau Dr, N Quail Dancer Ln, S Cam de Rancho Venado, S Monarch Way, Tunnel Canyon Pl, Twin Buttes Rd, Waterline Rd, W Cam de Rondo, W Cll Tres, W Cll Uno, W Falcon Way, W Hawk Way.
The Santa Rita Mountains, Ce:wi Doʼag in O’odham, rise about 40 miles southeast of Tucson. The white marble cliff on their western side reminded early Spanish missionaries of Saint Rita of Cascia, an Italian nun often shown with a small wound on her forehead, and the range was named for her. Mount Wrightson, at 9,453 feet, is the highest point in the range and in the Tucson area, and the range holds Madera Canyon, which its page calls one of the world’s premier birding areas. The Smithsonian’s Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory sits on Mount Hopkins.
Green Valley’s page calls the community home to the Titan Missile Museum, though the museum’s own page gives its address in Sahuarita. It’s a Titan II missile site built in 1963 and shut down in 1984, a National Historic Landmark since 1994, and the only place in the country where visitors can see an entirely preserved ICBM. The 103-foot missile in the silo has no warhead or fuel, and scenes for Star Trek: First Contact were filmed there. In 2005 Green Valley hosted the SAE Mini Baja 100, with about 60 university teams racing vehicles they’d built themselves.
This Green Valley map is a good addition to an office, library or den, and it can help teach children the geography and history of the area. It’s made for anyone who calls Green Valley home, and KNOWOL created it in 2026 to show the town as it looks today. Zoom in on the preview above to explore the details, then click here to get your copy of the Green Valley map.
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