Casa Grande Ruins & Historic Florence — The Hohokam Great House

A single unhurried day southeast of Phoenix that reaches back through a thousand years of Sonoran Desert history. The centerpiece is Casa Grande Ruins National Monument at Coolidge — the towering four-story earthen 'Great House' raised by the Ancestral Sonoran Desert People (the Hohokam) around 1350, the largest surviving structure of a civilization that engineered hundreds of miles of irrigation canals across the Salt and Gila river valleys. It became the first archaeological preserve in the United States in 1892. From the ruins the day shifts forward five centuries to Florence, one of Arizona's oldest and best-preserved territorial towns, where more than a hundred nineteenth-century buildings line the historic district and the adobe-walled McFarland State Historic Park recalls the town's frontier courthouse days. It is an easy, rewarding loop that packs deep Indigenous and territorial history into a comfortable day trip.