Arizpe

In dark orange, the territory of the Comandancia y Capitanía General de las Provincias Internas.

In 1776 Arizpe was made the capital of the Spanish colonial Comandancia y Capitanía General de las Provincias Internas. As the capital, Arizpe became a city by the end of the eighteenth century, the first in the Sonora region.

The Provincias Internas had jurisdiction over the provinces of: Sonora and Sinaloa (present day Sonora and Sinaloa, Nueva Vizcaya (present day Durango and Chihuahua), Las Californias (present day Baja California Peninsula and California), Nueva Vizcaya and Santa Fe de Nuevo México (present day New Mexico), Los Tejas (present day Texas), New Kingdom of León (present day Nuevo Leon), Nuevo Santander (present day Tamaulipas and southern Texas), and Coahuila in Nueva Extremadura (present-day Coahuila and Texas south of Nueces River).

In 1775 an overland expedition, led by Captain Juan Bautista de Anza, of colonial soldiers, missionaries, and settlers was approved by the King of Spain, for a more direct land route to and further colonization of Spanish Alta California. The De Anza Expedition reached San Francisco Bay in 1776, where de Anza located sites for the Presidio of San Francisco and Mission San Francisco de Asis (in present-day San Francisco, California).

Juan Bautista de Anza died in 1788 and is buried in Arizpe, at the Church of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción de Arizpe. In 1963, with the participation of delegations from the University of California, Berkeley and UC San Francisco, he was disinterred and reburied in a new marble memorial mausoleum at the same church.