What is La Siesta Campgrounds?
Arivaca is a one-street village of roughly 700 people in the grassland of the Altar Valley, 23 miles west of I-19 and 11 miles north of Mexico, with a mercantile, a cafe, a bar, a lot of birders in winter and a lot of Border Patrol all year. La Siesta Campgrounds is its only campground, a family property on a dirt road at the edge of town run by Steve Rendon, who opened it around 2012 and who every reviewer mentions by name. There is an upper terrace of level pull-through sites with water and 30-amp electric and a view over the valley, a large dry-camping field below it, tent sites, showers, restrooms, laundry, fire rings, Wi-Fi, a playground and a $5 dump station. Some trailers are long-term residents. It is plain, friendly and cheap, and it describes itself as country camping rather than an RV park.
The draw is Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, whose Arivaca Cienega and Arivaca Creek units start ten minutes away and whose 117,107 acres of grassland host pronghorn, masked bobwhite and one of the best winter bird lists in the state. The village itself is the other half of the appeal: a real place with a schoolhouse from 1879, a humanitarian-aid office, a Saturday farmers’ market in season and no chain anything.
What you get is a hookup, a hot shower and a knowledgeable host at the edge of a wildlife refuge, for less than any RV park on I-19. What you do not get is a resort, a pool, a store, posted rates or any certainty about hours without a phone call. For a Forest Service campground on a lake instead, White Rock at Peña Blanca is 40 minutes east.
How to camp La Siesta right
Reserve by phone. Rates are not published. Recent campers report about $15 a night for dry camping; earlier reports put hookup sites at $40 to $45 and tent sites at about $15; the dump station is $5. Reservations by phone at 520-398-3132, and worth making from December to March when the refuge birders and the snowbird rigs arrive. Stays run up to two weeks.
Get there. Loop 101 to I-10 east to Tucson, I-19 south to Arivaca Road at Amado (exit 48), then 23 miles west on a paved two-lane through the Altar Valley into Arivaca. Turn onto Hardscrabble Road, which is dirt and rough enough that the owner gives arriving guests their own directions; follow his, not the app’s, and arrive in daylight. About 185 minutes from Old Town. Arivaca has gas some of the time and basic groceries; stock up in Green Valley to be safe.
Pick the season. Roughly October through late spring; closed in summer, when the Altar Valley runs over 100 and the campground shuts. December through March is the birding season and the busy one; October and April are the quiet months with the same refuge and better light. Call before you go in any month.
Choose the terrace or the field. The upper terrace has the level pads, the hookups and the view; the dry field below has the space and the $15 night. Tent campers get their own spots. Some trailers are permanent, and the showers are basic; this is a working family property, not a resort.
Water and showers. Water at the hookup sites and in the bathhouse; showers and laundry on site; dump station $5. Fire rings at the sites, subject to the county’s fire restrictions in dry springs.
Do the refuge in the morning. Arivaca Cienega, a spring-fed marsh with a boardwalk loop, and the Arivaca Creek trail along a cottonwood bosque are the two units closest to the campground, both free, both best in the first two hours of light. The main refuge headquarters and the pronghorn grassland are 30 minutes south toward Sasabe, where the refuge also allows free primitive camping with no facilities. Afternoons belong to the village: the mercantile, the cafe, La Gitana bar, and the 1879 schoolhouse.
Dogs. Welcome on leash.
Border. Arivaca is a crossing corridor with a Border Patrol checkpoint on the road out and agents everywhere. Lock up, leave nothing in view, report rather than engage. The refuge closed about 3,500 acres near the line in 2006 for safety and some of it stays closed.
Skip it if you want a campground that publishes its prices and keeps office hours. For a Forest Service lake 40 minutes east by paved road, White Rock; for a canyon with water and showers in the Santa Ritas, Bog Springs at Madera Canyon; for the grassland without the border, Cieneguita at Las Cienegas.
A silver camp that became a village that kept its campground
Arivaca was a village before it had a name anyone wrote down. The site was probably a Pima or Tohono O’odham settlement, abandoned after the O’odham revolt of 1751 against the Spanish missions, and Spanish settlers worked small silver prospects in the hills around it afterward. In 1833 Mexico granted 8,677 acres here as the La Aribac ranch, and in 1856, three years after the Gadsden Purchase made it American, Charles Poston, the promoter who would later be called the father of Arizona, bought the grant and built reduction works at Arivaca for his Heintzelman silver mine at Cerro Colorado, a few miles east. The Court of Private Land Claims later threw out the grant, but the village stayed.
Its official birthday is April 10, 1878, when the post office opened under Noah W. Bernard. The next year Pedro Aguirre, a Mexican-born freighter and rancher whose family had run wagons on the Santa Fe Trail, built the Arivaca Schoolhouse, which still stands and is the oldest school building in Arizona, listed on the National Register in 2012. Aguirre’s Buenos Ayres ranch in the Altar Valley to the south is the land that would become the refuge a century later. The hills around the village hold more than 100 old mines; the Arivaca district produced gold, silver, lead, copper and tungsten from the Spanish period into the 1950s, and the village rose and fell with them: 236 people in 1890, a precinct of 2,480 at the 1910 peak, and only 26 residents in the 1960 census after the mines and the ghost town of Ruby, over the hill to the east, had emptied.
What refilled it was land and a road. Power lines reached Arivaca in 1956; in 1972 a developer subdivided 11,000 acres around the village into 40-acre ranchettes, and in 1976 the road from Amado was paved. Through the 1980s and 1990s newcomers arrived, retirees, artists, ranch hands and people who wanted to be left alone, and built a clinic, a fire department and a library branch. In 1985 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service bought the Buenos Aires ranch, by then a cattle operation, and created the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge to reintroduce the masked bobwhite quail, extinct in the United States since the early 1900s; its units along Arivaca Creek and the cienega at the edge of the village made Arivaca a birding destination almost overnight. The border made it something else at the same time. The village sits at one end of a 28-mile stretch near Sasabe that the government used to test its SBInet surveillance technology, No More Deaths began working out of Arivaca in 2004, a Border Patrol checkpoint on the road out drew an ACLU complaint in 2014, and in 2009 a home invasion by a rogue militia killed Raul Flores and his nine-year-old daughter, a crime that still shadows how the village talks about outsiders.
La Siesta belongs to the newest chapter. Steve Rendon opened the campground on his family’s Hardscrabble Road property around 2012, the only place in Arivaca a traveler could park a rig, and ran it quietly until 2018, when an anonymous complaint to Pima County’s environmental quality department found it operating as a commercial campground on residentially zoned land. The county gave him thirty days to meet requirements he said he could not afford, among them paving Hardscrabble Road. He closed; the village turned out for him; and the Board of Supervisors ultimately allowed the campground to continue under rural homestead zoning with code conditions. It has run seasonally since, closing each summer, and the 2020 census counted 623 people in the village it serves.
Why it matters
Arivaca is what southern Arizona looks like when the mine quits and nobody leaves: a Spanish silver camp, a Mexican land grant, a territorial schoolhouse, a 40-acre subdivision, a wildlife refuge and a border checkpoint, all within walking distance of one bar. La Siesta is the village’s campground in the same spirit, a family property that exists because its owner wanted it to and survived because his neighbors did. For a Scottsdale visitor it is the practical base for the best grassland birding in the state and a village worth an afternoon, three hours from Old Town, as long as you call first and bring realistic expectations and a flashlight for Hardscrabble Road.