Austin travel guide

Top 10 sights in Austin

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

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   1© Enmanuel · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum

   The presidential library of Lyndon Johnson on the University of Texas campus, in a windowless travertine block by Gordon Bunshaft holding 45 million pages of documents behind glass. An animatronic Johnson telling his own jokes is among the exhibits.

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2. 

   2© Stevensaylor · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Blanton Museum of Art

   One of the largest university art museums in the United States, with over 22,000 works and particular strength in Latin American art and European prints. Ellsworth Kelly's chapel Austin, his last work and only building, stands beside it.

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   Texas State Cemetery

   A cemetery of nine hectares just east of downtown, founded in 1851, where Stephen F. Austin and about three thousand other figures of Texas history are buried. The plan was reworked in 1994 with a plaza and monument axis.

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   Cathedral of Saint Mary

   The Catholic cathedral of Austin, built in 1884 in Gothic Revival on Tenth Street, and listed on the National Register in 1973. Its congregation was founded largely by German and Irish settlers.

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   5© Larry D. Moore · CC BY 4.0

   Harry Ransom Center

   A humanities archive at the University of Texas holding one of the twenty-one complete Gutenberg Bibles and the world's first photograph — Niépce's heliograph of about 1826. Its literary archives run from Joyce and Beckett to Gabriel García Márquez.

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   Hyde Park

   Austin's first suburb, laid out in 1891 by Monroe Shipe around a streetcar line and an artificial lake, between 38th and 45th streets north of the university. Marketed in its day as whites-only, it is now among the densest quarters of the urban core; part joined the National Register in 1990.

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   Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center

   The state botanical garden and arboretum of Texas, founded in 1982 by Lady Bird Johnson to promote native plants against imported turf and roadside planting. Its meadows, cisterns and stone architecture are built as a demonstration of dryland gardening.

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8. 

   8© Matthew Fuller · CC BY-SA 3.0

   The Contemporary Austin

   A contemporary art museum split between a downtown gallery and the Laguna Gloria estate on Lake Austin, a 1916 Italianate villa in fourteen acres now used as a sculpture park. Its Museum Without Walls programme places works in city parks.

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9. 

   9© LoneStarMike · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Congress Avenue Historic District

   The city's ceremonial spine, a six-lane avenue running north to the Texas Capitol of 1888 and south over Lady Bird Lake into the shops and music venues of South Congress. The 19th-century commercial blocks along its lower end make up the historic district.

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10. 

    10© Vuemobi Media · CC BY-SA 4.0

    Downtown

    The central business district of Austin, bounded by Lamar, Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard, Interstate 35 and the lake, holding the capitol and Sixth Street. About 1.5 million Mexican free-tailed bats roost under the Congress Avenue bridge from March to October.

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Popular tickets & tours in Austin

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1. 

   1© LoneStarMike · CC BY 3.0

   Hippie Hollow Park

   A county park on Lake Travis northwest of Austin, and the only legally recognised clothing-optional public park in Texas. It is rock rather than sand, reached down a steep path, and has been used this way since the 1960s.

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   2© Mwyzykowski0821 · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Zilker Park

   A 142-hectare park where Barton Creek meets the Colorado, holding Barton Springs — a spring-fed pool of about three million litres a day that stays near twenty degrees all year and shelters an endangered salamander. Austin City Limits is staged on its lawns.

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   Bullock Texas State History Museum

   The state history museum, opened in 2001 opposite the university, with three floors on land, identity and opportunity. The excavated hull of La Belle, La Salle's ship wrecked in Matagorda Bay in 1686, is displayed on the ground floor.

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4. 

   4© Larry D. Moore · CC BY 4.0

   McKinney Falls State Park

   A 301-hectare state park at the southeastern edge of Austin where Onion Creek meets Williamson Creek, with two waterfalls over limestone ledges. The ruins of an 1850s gristmill and a rock shelter used for thousands of years are on the trails.

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   5© Justin Jensen · CC BY 2.0

   South Congress

   A district on South Congress Avenue known as SoCo, of small shops, restaurants and music venues, and a strip of motels in the 1960s and 1970s. The Continental Club has run live music here since 1955.

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   Littlefield Fountain

   A memorial of 1933 at the main entrance to the University of Texas, designed by Pompeo Coppini, honouring the university's dead of the First World War. Columbia rides the prow of a ship above the basin, with bronze horses in the water.

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   Zilker Botanical Garden

   An eleven-hectare botanical garden in Zilker Park, opened in 1955, with a Japanese garden built largely single-handed by Isamu Taniguchi in his seventies. Dinosaur tracks found on the site in 1992 are preserved in one corner.

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   8© Chris.w.braun · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Texas Military Forces Museum

   A military museum at Camp Mabry, the Texas National Guard base, covering Texan forces from the revolution through the Civil War to Iraq. Tanks, artillery and aircraft stand outside, and battle reenactments are staged twice a year.

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   Elisabet Ney Museum

   The stone studio the sculptor Elisabet Ney built for herself in Austin in 1892, kept as a museum of her work. Her marble figures of Texan founders and of Schopenhauer, whom she knew in Germany, are in the rooms where she carved them.

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10. 

    10© Larry D. Moore · CC BY 4.0

    Buford Tower

    A tower of 1930 on the north shore of Lady Bird Lake, built as a fire drill and hose-drying tower and designed to look like an Italian campanile. A carillon was added in 1968 and it is the last such municipal fire structure in the city.

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