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Tucson exists on its own terms, which is partly why it has never been mistaken for Phoenix. The Sonoran Desert surrounds the city on every side, and the saguaro cactus -- which can live 150 years and grows its first arm only after 75 -- gives the landscape a slow, monumental quality that seeps into the city's character. The University of Arizona was founded here in 1885, thirteen years before Arizona became a state, and the campus's red-brick Spanish Colonial buildings anchor a student-heavy neighborhood of bookshops, vintage stores, and food trucks along Fourth Avenue.

San Xavier del Bac, known as the White Dove of the Desert, stands 15 kilometers south of downtown: a Spanish mission church completed in 1797 in brilliant white stucco, with two asymmetrical towers and a Baroque interior of painted saints and gilded altars that has been compared to churches in Mexico City.

The Tohono O'odham people on whose land it was built still maintain the church and conduct services there. Barrio Viejo, the adobe neighborhood immediately south of downtown, preserves some of the oldest residential architecture in the city -- squat, thick-walled buildings painted in sherbet colors that cool themselves through mass rather than air conditioning.