Tempe Audioguides

Tempe occupies a flat desert municipality in the Phoenix metropolitan area, east of Phoenix proper and west of Mesa, and its personality is shaped almost entirely by Arizona State University, one of the largest universities in the United States with over 70,000 students on its main campus. The university's most architecturally striking building is Grady Gammage Memorial Auditorium, completed in 1964 from plans Frank Lloyd Wright designed shortly before his death in 1959, a circular structure with a grand colonnade that sits at the edge of campus like a Mediterranean amphitheater dropped into the Sonoran Desert.

Mill Avenue, the main commercial strip running south from campus to Tempe Town Lake, functions as the city's living room, dense with bars, restaurants, and music venues that serve the student population and attract visitors from across the metro.

Tempe Town Lake, created in 1999 by floating rubber dams on the Salt River, offers kayaking, crew rowing, and a lakeside path within a few blocks of the university. The desert heat is real and July temperatures regularly exceed 43 degrees Celsius, which means the city's outdoor culture exists primarily between October and April.