Old Tucson

The place

Old Tucson is a movie studio and theme park located west of Tucson, Arizona, at the foot of the Tucson Mountains and near Saguaro National Park. The site was built in 1939 by Columbia Pictures on land from Pima County, in the form of a reconstruction of the city of Tucson from the 1860s, originally intended to serve as a backdrop for the filming of the movie Arizona. The teams erected more than fifty buildings in about forty days, making hundreds of thousands of adobe bricks from desert soil. Opened to the public as a tourist attraction in 1960, it has become one of the most famous western film locations in the United States, having hosted several hundred feature films and television series. A fire in 1995 destroyed part of its historical structures, which were then partially rebuilt.