Sedona

City in north-central Arizona, 40 km/25 mi southwest of Flagstaff, at the northern end of Oak Creek Canyon; population (1990) 7,700. An agricultural community from prehistory into the 20th century, it has since the 1970s been an art and tourist centre and a resort, retirement, and spiritual mecca.

‘Vortexes’, which adherents of New Age philosophy believe to be intense concentrations of spiritual energies, were identified here in the 1980s, attracting numbers of metaphysical believers to the red rocks and mesas surrounding Sedona. The Catholic Chapel of the Holy Cross, designed by US architect Frank Lloyd Wright, is to the southeast.