Audioguides Phoenix

Phoenix was named for the mythical bird that rises from ashes, which is accurate in its way: the city was built directly over a Hohokam civilization that had constructed roughly 500 miles of irrigation canals across the Salt River Valley before abandoning the site around 1450 AD. When Anglo-American settlers arrived in 1867, they dug new canals in the same channels the Hohokam had used centuries earlier. The city that grew from those arrangements has become one of the fastest-expanding metropolitan areas in the United States, adding over a million residents in recent decades to a desert basin that receives fewer than 8 inches of rain per year.

Phoenix requires a car in ways that most American cities only approximate -- it sprawls intentionally across the desert, with Scottsdale, Tempe, Mesa, and Chandler functioning as effectively separate towns in an unbroken metropolitan sprawl.

What rewards the logistical effort is the landscape itself: Camelback Mountain rises from the suburban grid without warning, and hiking trails on its flanks at sunrise offer views that are difficult to believe. The Desert Botanical Garden in Papago Park holds one of the world's most comprehensive collections of desert plants from five continents. The Heard Museum downtown has the finest collection of Native American art in the American Southwest. Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West, in Scottsdale, is the architect's winter home and studio and still functions as a working architecture school.