Montezuma Hotel

The Montezuma Hotel stands in the border city of Nogales, Santa Cruz County, Arizona, a short distance north of the international line with Sonora, Mexico. The hotel was built in the early twentieth century, during the period in which Nogales was developing as a binational railroad and customs town along the line of the New Mexico and Arizona Railroad. It is one of the surviving early commercial buildings of the Nogales central business district and a representative example of Spanish Colonial Revival commercial architecture as the style was practiced in the Arizona border country.

Construction is masonry — fired brick or hollow tile faced in stucco — rather than sun-dried adobe block, in keeping with the period's preference for more durable urban commercial fabric finished to suggest the older Sonoran tradition. Defining features include the arcaded and arched window openings, scrolled parapet, terra-cotta tile accents at the principal cornice, and the painted stucco facades that read against the more austere mining-and-railroad buildings around it. The plan provides ground-floor commercial space with hotel rooms above, the standard arrangement of a Western downtown hotel of its size and period.

The Montezuma served railroad travelers, cross-border merchants, and the broader binational business community of Nogales for decades. The property was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985 under reference number 85001867 in recognition of its architectural and commercial-historical significance to the Nogales townsite.

The building continues in hotel and mixed-commercial use today. Within Arizona's adobe and Hispanic-derived architectural tradition the Montezuma represents the early-twentieth-century urban application of Spanish Colonial Revival to a border railroad city — a stuccoed masonry hotel that drew on the older Sonoran vocabulary to give the commercial heart of Nogales a regionally and binationally appropriate civic presence.