What it means
A ramada is shade on posts: an open-sided shelter with a roof and no walls. In Arizona it is a perfectly ordinary word. Every city park has them, the covered picnic slabs with tables and a grill where birthday parties happen; every resort pool has a fancier version; many backyards have a wood or steel one off the patio. “We got the big ramada at Chaparral” means a family reunion is sorted.
Newcomers trip on it because, to most Americans, Ramada is a hotel brand. In Scottsdale the hotel is the second meaning. The first is the shelter, and the shelter is older than the Spanish word for it.
Long before parks departments, the Akimel O’odham and Piipaash built shade houses beside every home along the Salt and Gila rivers. The Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community calls it a vato in O’odham and mathkyaaly in Piipaash, and notes that many daily activities took place under it rather than inside. Traditional and modern ramadas are still in everyday use in the Community, just east of Scottsdale.
Where you’ll meet it
At Chaparral, Eldorado, Indian School and other city parks, on the city’s reservation calendar, at the Community’s Huhugam Ki Museum, on trailhead shade structures, and on hotel signs along the old highways.
Where the word came from
Ramada is American Spanish, built on rama, branch, with the ending that means a place full of something: a place of branches, which is exactly what the first ones were. Merriam-Webster dates its first known use in English to 1853 and defines it as a roofed shelter with usually open sides.
The structure itself is Indigenous. The National Park Service describes the O’odham wa:ato as a four-legged frame of mesquite with a roof of ocotillo, sometimes with saguaro ribs, tied with agave or yucca cord. It shaded markets and gatherings, extended a home outdoors in the hot season and sheltered families during travel and the saguaro harvest. Many lasted a single season and were rebuilt. The Salt River version used arrowweed for thatch. Spanish speakers arriving in the region gave the structure a Spanish name; they did not invent it.
The hotel chain came from the same word. Marion W. Isbell, with investors including Del Webb, built the chain’s first motel on Route 66 in Flagstaff in 1954, and Ramada Inns grew into a Phoenix-based company with about 500 motels in 45 states by the early 1970s. A shady place to stop is a fair pitch for a roadside motel.
What it is not
A ramada is not a casita, which has walls and a bed, and not a gazebo, which is usually round and ornamental. A cabana is its resort-pool cousin: shade, yes, but with curtains and a minimum spend.
The fine print
The Valley Ho twist. Ramada bought Scottsdale’s Hotel Valley Ho in 1973 and, over the following decades, wore down Edward Varney’s modernist design until preservationists feared demolition. Westroc bought it in 2001 and restored it. So the most famous Ramada in Scottsdale history is remembered mainly for what had to be undone. Isbell himself died in Scottsdale in 1988.
Booking a park ramada. The city’s Facility Booking Office, at 7641 E. Murray Lane, handles ramadas along with meeting rooms, picnic areas and courts. Reservable ramadas are at Cactus, Chaparral, Eldorado, Horizon, Indian School, Scottsdale Ranch and Vista del Camino parks; check the city’s page for which ones are bookable online. The McDowell Sonoran Preserve has shade structures at trailheads but nothing to reserve.
Design note. A ramada is the simplest honest answer to desert sun: block the overhead light, let the breeze through. Taliesin West’s canvas roofs, the Civic Center’s deep overhangs and every carport in South Scottsdale are arguments in the same family.