What it’s actually like
Stand on Lincoln Drive at sunset and you are looking at the reason Scottsdale exists as a resort town. Camelback Mountain goes terracotta, the palms go black against it, and strung along the road below are ninety years of resorts, each one built on the promise that a winter here beats a winter anywhere else.
The corridor runs along Camelback Road and Lincoln Drive from the Arcadia edge east to Scottsdale Road. Almost none of it is legally Scottsdale. The Town of Paradise Valley incorporated in 1961 precisely to keep this land as low-density resorts and estates, and it has done that job with a zeal that borders on comic. What you get is a district of walled properties, hushed lawns, no sidewalks to speak of, and a level of quiet you cannot buy anywhere else in the Valley.
The Phoenician is the monument, opened in 1988 at a cost that scandalized the country and grown up gorgeous since. The Camelback Inn has been renting casitas since 1936 and is the model every later property copied. Sanctuary sits on the mountainside where John Gardiner’s Tennis Ranch used to host senators. Mountain Shadows was the Rat Pack hotel, died, waited a decade and came back modern. The Omni Montelucia is an Andalusian village built on the grave of La Posada, whose swim-up grotto bar three generations of Valley kids still mourn. The Hermosa Inn is a cowboy artist’s hand-built adobe with forty-three casitas and the best hidden dinner in the corridor. At the Scottsdale Road end, the Hilton bell tower and the Kimpton Miralina, the old Scottsdale Plaza, hold the crossroads.
Where to eat and drink
The corridor eats in resorts, and the best of it does not feel like hotel food.
El Chorro is the one everyone agrees on: an adobe dinner house between Camelback and Mummy mountains, sticky buns on the table since 1937, sunsets on the lawn. Elements at Sanctuary is the definitive view table in the Valley. Lon’s at the Hermosa is dinner inside Lon Megargee’s 1930s hacienda, wood-fired and Arizona-rooted. Hearth ‘61 at Mountain Shadows puts the mountain behind floor-to-ceiling glass. Prado at Montelucia does the Spanish courtyard and one of the biggest Sunday brunches in the city. At the Phoenician, J&G Steakhouse owns the sunset table and Mowry & Cotton is the fire-driven modern side.
Off the resort grounds, the Scottsdale Road line is the neighborhood’s own dining strip: Hillstone for the deal-closing booths, Fat Ox for Matt Carter’s modern Italian, Roka Akor for robata and sushi, Veneto Trattoria for the last real Venetian kitchen in town.
The losses are the grandest in Scottsdale. Mary Elaine’s on the Phoenician’s roof was Arizona’s fine-dining standard for twenty years. The Chaparral Room carved chateaubriand tableside at the Camelback Inn until 2008. Rancho Pinot invented Arizona farm-to-table at Scottsdale and Lincoln and closed in 2021.
Getting there and parking
From the airport, take the 202 to the 51 north, exit at Lincoln or Camelback, and head east; typically twenty to twenty-five minutes. From Old Town, Scottsdale Road north to Lincoln, then west; ten minutes. There is no transit worth mentioning and no walking between properties. Lincoln Drive has no continuous sidewalk, the resorts are a half mile apart, and Paradise Valley likes it that way.
Every resort valets, and most will validate for a restaurant reservation. Self-parking exists at the Phoenician, Camelback Inn and Montelucia but is a walk. For hiking, the Camelback trailheads are the corridor’s only real parking problem: Echo Canyon on the Phoenix side and Cholla on the Paradise Valley side both fill before dawn on cool-season weekends. The summer sunrise rules note applies here from June through September.
When to go
The corridor is the most seasonal district in the city. Winter rates are the highest in Arizona, and March is the peak of the peak: perfect weather, spring training ten minutes away, every lawn full. If you want the corridor at its best without the wallet damage, November and early December are the answer; the mountain is at its most photogenic in the low light and the resorts have not yet filled.
Summer is when locals use these places. From June through September the same rooms run at a fraction of winter rates, the pools are the point, and the spas are empty. July at the Phoenician is a genuinely good week if you accept that the desert is closed between ten and six. The monsoon evenings, with lightning over the McDowells from a Lincoln Drive patio, are the corridor’s secret season.
How it got this way
The resort idea arrived here before Scottsdale had paved streets. The Ingleside Inn opened as a private club in 1909 among citrus groves near 64th Street and became the Valley’s first luxury winter resort in the 1920s; it wrote the playbook. The Jokake Inn grew from a painter’s tearoom in 1926 into adobe casitas below the mountain, and its 1936 bell towers still stand on the Phoenician’s lawn. Camelback Inn opened the same year, and the Hermosa was Lon Megargee’s home before it was an inn. The 1930s set the pattern: a winter season, casitas, sun, and a wealthy eastern clientele.
Postwar came the second wave — the Paradise Inn, the Casa Blanca Inn with its onion dome, Mountain Shadows in 1959, the tennis ranch. Paradise Valley incorporated in 1961 to keep it low and quiet. Then Charles Keating bought the neighborhood in the mid-1980s, erased the Paradise Inn, and built the Phoenician, which set the scale for everything after. The 2000s and 2010s were the second-act era: Sanctuary in 2001, Montelucia in 2008, Mountain Shadows reborn in 2017, each replacing an older resort. The Smoke Tree, the last little ranch resort on Lincoln, closed in 2020; the corridor’s dude-ranch scale ended with it.
Nearby
Old Town is ten minutes south on Scottsdale Road. Central Scottsdale and the Greenbelt is directly east across Scottsdale Road. North on the same road, Gainey Ranch and McCormick Ranch are the next generation of resort planning.