Siting a fictional setting in an actual time and place requires some degree of creative license.  Still, The High Chaparral gave us the most realistic setting of any television Western before or since.  It was largely true to the Arizona Territory of the 1870's.  Many of the geographic sites referred to or visited were real places - Tucson, Tombstone, Tubac, Nogales, Fort Bowie, Oracle, Sonora, and more.  Other sites were clearly the fictional invention of the story writers and their supposed locations are open to speculation. To aid in that speculation we offer these geographic resources.  

We know that the series was filmed at Old Tucson, just outside of Tucson, Arizona.  In most of the episodes, the ranch was supposed to be about 30 miles from Tucson.  In "The Peacemaker" in the first season we got to see a sketched map of its location.  Below that is an actual map of Southern Arizona in 1895.  Just south of Tucson you can see the Mission San Xavier del Bac, the site used to film Rancho Montoya, which in the series, of course, was supposed to be in Sonora, Mexico.