What it means
The Valley is metropolitan Phoenix, every square mile of it, and it is the word Arizonans reach for when a city name would be too specific or too much trouble. A Scottsdale resident asked where she lives by a stranger in Seattle says “Phoenix.” Asked by someone from Tucson she says “the Valley,” and asked by someone from Mesa she finally says “Scottsdale.” The word lets five million people claim one place while living in twenty-five cities, and it does a second job on the state’s weather maps, where “the Valley” is the hot low country and “up north” is everything above the Rim.
The full name, the Valley of the Sun, is a different register entirely. Television stations use it in idents, resorts use it in brochures, and the Thunderbirds use it in their mission statement, but nobody says it in a sentence. Saying it marks you as a newscaster or a newcomer.
Where you’ll meet it
Every local news broadcast and traffic report. The best-time-to-visit guide, where the Valley’s heat sets the calendar. The regional planning agency, MAG, whose maps are the closest thing the Valley has to an official border. And the argument over the East Valley, which is where Scottsdale’s membership gets complicated.
Where the word came from
The geography is real. Phoenix sits in the Salt River Valley, the broad basin the river cut between the Estrella and White Tank mountains on the west and the Superstitions and McDowells on the east, and that was the region’s name from the first canal diggers of the 1860s through the farm decades that followed. Scottsdale’s founders bought land in the Salt River Valley; the Water Users’ Association that built Roosevelt Dam was the Salt River Valley Water Users’ Association. It was a good agricultural name. It was a poor name for selling hotel rooms, since “salt” suggests nothing a winter visitor wants.
The Phoenix Chamber of Commerce fixed that during the Depression. In 1935, by the account Arizona geographers and the Chamber’s own history give, a local advertising agency working for the Chamber produced “the Valley of the Sun,” and the phrase went into the national magazine campaigns aimed at the eastern winter trade. It never came out. The Chamber’s booster offshoot, the Thunderbirds, was formed two years later with a brief its current director still paraphrases as promoting the Valley of the Sun through sport, and the slogan has been on letterheads, hotel signs and television ever since.
What residents did with it is the interesting part. They dropped the sun. By the postwar boom “the Valley” alone meant the whole metropolitan area, and as the suburbs grew the word grew with them: Buckeye to Apache Junction, Anthem to Queen Creek, roughly the Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler metropolitan area that the Census Bureau counted at 4,845,832 people in 2020 and estimates at about 5.2 million now. The ASU geographer Duncan Shaeffer told KJZZ in 2026 that the real edges are the mountain ranges and that the perimeter is “somewhat fuzzy,” which is exactly how everyone uses it.
What it is not
The Valley is not Phoenix the city, which is why a Scottsdale resident can say it without lying. It is also not the Verde Valley, which is Cottonwood and Sedona up Interstate 17, and not “the valley” of California, which is a different conversation. When someone from Tucson says “the Valley” with a certain tone, they mean all of this and a few opinions about it.
The fine print
The word has internal borders. The East Valley is Mesa, Tempe, Chandler, Gilbert, Queen Creek and Apache Junction; the West Valley is Glendale, Peoria, Avondale, Goodyear, Surprise and Buckeye; Interstate 17 and the Phoenix city limits are the informal seam, and the East Valley entry explains why Scottsdale, which sits northeast of both, belongs to neither by most reckonings and to the East Valley by the transit agency’s. “North Valley” and “the Northeast Valley” appear in real estate copy and the names of a few institutions, and Scottsdale is sometimes filed under the second.
The slogan’s date is firmer than most such things. The Chamber campaign is placed in 1935 by KJZZ’s reporting and by the geographers it consulted; some local accounts put the first appearance of the phrase a year earlier, and the lexicon follows the better-documented date while noting that advertising copy rarely leaves a clean birth certificate. The agency and the copywriter are not named in any source this site has found, so the credit goes to the Chamber that paid for it.
The Valley has no government. The Maricopa Association of Governments coordinates transportation and air quality across 27 cities and towns, three Native nations and two counties, which is as close to a Valley-wide authority as exists; the regional transportation guide covers it. Everything else, from police to water to the name on your mail, belongs to the city you are actually standing in, which is the point the Scottsdale vs. Phoenix entry exists to make.