Tanque Verde is a suburban unincorporated community in Pima County, Arizona, United States, northeast of Tucson.

For statistical purposes, the United States Census Bureau has defined Tanque Verde as a census-designated place (CDP).

Tanque Verde began as a small community, remote from Tucson, and settled by ranchers arriving to the American West around the 1860s.

Soon they began farming the rich floodplain northeast of the fort, where Pantano Wash feeds into Tanque Verde Creek to form the Rillito (Little River), and by the turn of the century the community they came to call El Fuerte was thriving.

[2] Upstream from El Fuerte, in the canyons and nooks (rincons) of the front range of the Santa Catalina Mountains and the Rincon range—the area they came to call Tanque Verde—Hispanic families with names like Escalante, Estrada, Andrade, Vindiola, Lopez, Riesgo, Benitez, Telles, Martinez, and Gallegos began establishing homes and ranches.

[3] Initially the largely self-sufficient community of homesteads thrived, but over time many of the smaller ranches were swallowed up by larger ones or sold to speculators.

According to Frank Escalante, a descendant of Tanque Verde homesteaders, some non-Hispanic Americans robbed some of these families of their land titles and ranches by fraud or force.

[4] The First World War brought a rise in the market for cotton and the value of farmland, and still more of the original homesteaders felt pressured to sell.

The Tanque Verde School District continues to register among the highest standardized test scores in Arizona.