Tucson takes its name from the O’odham words Cuk Ṣon, “the base is black,” for the dark basalt hill now called Sentinel Peak, and people have farmed beneath that hill for more than 4,000 years. This map of Tucson prints El Tiradito, the Pima County Courthouse, Fort Lowell Park, the El Presidio Historic District, the West University Historic District and the University of Arizona, from Pascua Yaqui Indian Village out to Rolling Hills Country Club Estates, with Enchanted Peak, the Poorman Range and Sentinel Peak giving shape to the land.
Tucson is the county seat of Pima County and its largest city, about 60 miles north of the Mexican border.
KNOWOL made this map in 2026 and gave modern data the look of a vintage atlas. The shaded relief of Enchanted Peak, the Poorman Range and Sentinel Peak comes from United States Geological Survey elevation data, and the streets were drawn from Census Bureau files. Historic sites such as El Tiradito, the Pima County Courthouse and Fort Lowell Park were confirmed against the National Park Service and the National Register of Historic Places. The 2020 census counted 542,630 people in the city, the second most in Arizona after Phoenix, on a desert plain ringed by the Santa Catalina, Tortolita, Santa Rita, Rincon and Tucson mountains.
The Old Pueblo
Farmers lived along the Santa Cruz River here long before Europeans came; archaeologists have found a village site from 2100 BC, and the Hohokam, known for their great irrigation canals and red-on-brown pottery, lived in the valley from about AD 600 to 1450. The Jesuit missionary Eusebio Kino came to the O’odham here in the 1690s. On August 20, 1775, Hugo O’Conor chose the site of the Presidio San Agustín del Tucsón on a terrace above the river, beside the O’odham village of Cuk Ṣon, and the fort’s adobe walls were finished in 1783; today’s Pima County Courthouse was built near the site. Tucson became part of Mexico in 1821 and part of the United States through the Gadsden Purchase, served as capital of the Arizona Territory from 1867 to 1877, and incorporated in 1877, which makes it the oldest incorporated city in Arizona. When the railroad arrived on March 20, 1880, Mayor Bob Leatherwood sent telegrams to leaders around the world announcing that the “ancient and honorable pueblo” was now connected by rail, and the phrase is commonly given as the source of the city’s nickname, the Old Pueblo. Tucson stayed Arizona’s largest city through the territorial years until Phoenix passed it in 1920.
The territorial legislature founded the University of Arizona in 1885, the first university in the Arizona Territory. Its Steward Observatory has one of the few facilities in the world that can cast and shape the giant mirrors used in today’s largest telescopes, and with roughly 150 local companies working in optics, Tucson earned the nickname Optics Valley. In 2015 UNESCO made Tucson the first City of Gastronomy in the United States, a city noted for its Sonoran Mexican cooking. Its tables run from the Sonoran hot dog, wrapped in bacon and topped with pinto beans, to Chinese chorizo, a pork sausage seasoned with soy sauce born in the city’s Chinese grocery stores, and Mission Garden, a four-acre living museum at the foot of Sentinel Peak, grows the heritage crops and trees of the many peoples who have farmed here.
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.
Places: Downtown, Sentinel Peak and Oracle Foothills Estates.
Streets and roads: W Sunset Rd, Ocotillo Dr, E Woodland Rd, E Coronado Rd, E Roger Rd, E Speedway, E Miles St, Catalina Hwy, E Corona Rd, E Hughes Access Rd, E Aerospace Pw, W Ajo Hwy.
More street names, A to Z
Alvord Rd, Andrada Rd, Blackjack Ranch Rd, Cleveland Way, Coolidge St, Dawn Rd, E Brekke Rd, E Cam Boleadoras, E Canada St, E Cll Santa Cruz, E Dales Dr, E Dawn Rd, E Littletown Rd, E Los Reales Rd, E McDonald Rd, E Nogales Old Vail Connection Rd, E Old Vail Connection Rd, E Old Vail Rd, E Pima Mine Rd, E Pinal Vis, E Poorman Rd, E Rocket Rd, Forest Dr, Frontage Rd, Golf Links Rd, Harrison Rd, Hill Rd, Hndrada Rd, Ibm Rd, Kolb Rd, Los Reales Rd, Mary Ann Ct, N Park Blvd, Picacito St, Pima Mine Ranch Rd, Ranch Rd, Riata Rd, S Access Rd, Santa Rita Rd, San Xavier Rd, S Toki Oidak Wog, S Wentworth Rd, W Pima Mine Rd, Yuma St.
Mariachi, music and the people who gather
Tucson is considered an influential center for mariachi music, and the Tucson International Mariachi Conference has brought hundreds of bands and folklórico dancers to town each April since 1982. Lalo Guerrero, born in Tucson in 1916, became known as the father of Chicano music, recorded more than 700 songs and received the National Medal of Arts in 1996. Linda Ronstadt, born in Tucson in 1946, won 11 Grammy Awards and took her album celebrating her Mexican heritage, Canciones de Mi Padre, to Broadway in 1988; as a child she remembered Guerrero singing to her, and she sang a traditional Mexican song at his funeral. Every October, Tucson Meet Yourself fills downtown with the dancing, singing, art and food of more than 30 of the city’s ethnic groups, all performed by people from Tucson and the area around it. The All Souls Procession, begun by artist Susan Kay Johnson with 35 people in 1990, drew an estimated 50,000 by 2013. The Tucson Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1929, is the oldest performing arts organization in Arizona, and the city’s page calls the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show the largest such exposition in the world.
Around the map
El Tiradito, “the little castaway,” is a shrine on South Main Avenue in the old barrio, also called the Wishing Shrine. Its legends date to the 1870s and come in more than twenty versions, and people still light candles there; legend says a candle that burns through the night will grant the wish of the one who lit it. When a planned highway threatened the shrine and the neighborhood in 1971, residents formed the El Tiradito Committee and won its listing on the National Register, and it became the first property in Arizona listed for its traditional cultural values. The Pima County Courthouse, designed by Roy Place in 1928 in the Mission Revival and Spanish Colonial Revival styles, now houses the Southern Arizona Heritage & Visitor Center. El Presidio is Tucson’s oldest neighborhood, and West University sits between the university and downtown. The presidio’s own walls came down after 1856, and a reconstruction of the fort’s northeast corner was finished in 2007 after archaeologists found its tower.
Fort Lowell Park keeps the ruins of Fort Lowell, an Army post from 1873 to 1891 just south of where the Tanque Verde and Pantano creeks meet, a site the Hohokam chose centuries before; the adobe walls of its hospital still stand under a protective roof. After the Army left, families from Sonora settled around the ruins, and in the 1930s and 1940s the area became an artists’ colony visited by Jack Kerouac. Pascua Yaqui Indian Village grew in the early 20th century, when Yaqui families who had fled Mexico settled south of Tucson in a place they named Pascua, Spanish for Easter; they built a church named San Ignacio de Loyola and brought back their Lenten and Easter ceremonies, with the Yaqui deer dancer, and the tribe won federal recognition on September 18, 1978. On Sentinel Peak, University of Arizona students finished a huge basalt “A” in 1916 that gave the hill its other name, “A” Mountain. Rolling Hills Country Club Estates, Enchanted Peak and the Poorman Range have their places on the sheet as well.
This Tucson map makes 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 Tucson home, from the barrio around El Tiradito to the foothills, and KNOWOL created it in 2026 to show the city as it looks today. Zoom in on the preview above to explore the details, then click here to get your copy of the Tucson map.
Sources
- Tucson, Arizona, Wikipedia
- Presidio San Agustín del Tucsón, Wikipedia
- Sentinel Peak (Arizona), Wikipedia
- Mission Garden, Wikipedia
- University of Arizona, Wikipedia
- Steward Observatory, Wikipedia
- El Tiradito, Wikipedia
- Pima County Courthouse, Wikipedia
- Fort Lowell (Tucson, Arizona), Wikipedia
- Pascua Yaqui Tribe, Wikipedia
- Lalo Guerrero, Wikipedia
- Linda Ronstadt, Wikipedia
