Casa Grande Ruins National Monument – Casa Grande, AZ

These ruins are located around a one hour drive from Phoenix. We visited this place in March 2023 and spent about two hours there.

Highlights on information about these ruins which captured my attention, as well as some photos I took while visiting it, are presented below:

Archeologists have discovered evidence that the ancestral Sonoran Desert people who built the Casa Grande also developed wide-scale irrigation farming and extensive trade connections which lasted over a thousand years until about 1450 C.E.
Archeologists call a site where there are earthen buildings, red on buff pottery, and extensive canals “Hohokam” but this is not the name of a tribe or a people. Years of misunderstanding have confused the ancestors of the O’Odham, Hopi, and Zuni people with the name Hohokam, which is not a word in any of their languages nor the name of a separate people.
Casa Grande was no longer used around 1450 C.E. Since the ancestral Sonoran Desert people who built it left no written language behind, written historic accounts of the Casa Grande begin with the journal entries of Padre Eusebio Francisco Kino (known as “Padre Kino” in Spanish) when he visited the ruins in 1694. In his description of the large ancient structure before him, he wrote the words “casa grande” (or “great house”) which are still used today.
More became known about the ruins with the later visits of Lt. Col. Juan Bautista de Anza’s expedition in 1775 and Brig. Gen. Stephen Watts Kearny’s military detachment in 1846. Subsequent articles written about the Casa Grande increased public interest. During the 1860’s through the 1880’s more people began to visit the ruins with the arrival of a railroad line twenty miles to the west and a connecting stagecoach route that ran right by the Casa Grande. The resulting damage from souvenir hunting, graffiti and outright vandalism raised serious concerns about the preservation of the Casa Grande.
Several anthropologists and researchers studied these ruins throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nowadays, continuing research, ruins repairs, interpretive programs, and visitor center remodeling are all part of the continuing effort to provide the best visitor experience possible.