Casa Grande Ruins

Hats off to Casa Grande Ruins

Casa Grande Ruins National Monument is an easy day trip from the Phoenix area, about an hour’s drive southeast near Coolidge, Arizona.

The site protects a massive four-story structure built by the Hohokam people around 1350 AD out of caliche, a natural desert soil that hardens like cement. It’s the largest known Hohokam building ever found, though no one is completely certain what it was used for. The Hohokam abandoned the region by around 1450, likely driven out by a combination of prolonged drought, flooding, and the breakdown of the irrigation systems their farming depended on. Those canals were remarkable in their own right — the Hohokam engineered hundreds of miles of them through the Sonoran Desert, and when Mormon settlers founded Mesa, Arizona in 1878, they rediscovered the abandoned canals and rebuilt parts of their own irrigation system on top of them. Some sections are still in use today.

Casa Grande was also a historic first: in 1892, President Benjamin Harrison set it aside as the nation’s first federally protected archaeological site, and it became a National Monument in 1918.