Nashville travel guide

Top 10 sights in Nashville

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

1. 

   1© Sean Russell from Knoxville, TN, USA · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum

   A museum and archive of country music opened in 1967 and rebuilt in 2001, whose building is shaped in details borrowed from the music — window mullions like piano keys, a roofline like a 1950s Cadillac fin. Its collection is the definitive archive of the form.

   TiqetsKlook
2. 

   2© Mayur Phadtare · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Parthenon

   A full-size replica of the Athenian Parthenon, built in plaster for the 1897 centennial exposition and rebuilt permanently in concrete in the 1920s. It holds a gilded Athena nearly thirteen metres high, made in the 1990s from the ancient descriptions.

   TiqetsKlook
3. 

   3© Peter Meenen · CC BY 2.5

   Nashville Zoo at Grassmere

   A zoo on the grounds of Grassmere, a nineteenth-century farm whose house and family cemetery are preserved inside the park. It runs one of the larger clouded leopard breeding programmes in North America.

   TiqetsKlook
4. 

   4

   Fort Negley

   A Union fortification built in 1862 after the capture of Nashville, using the forced labour of some two thousand seven hundred Black workers, of whom hundreds died. The city spent decades treating it as a park before acknowledging that, and now interprets both.

   TiqetsKlook
5. 

   5© Kathleen Conklin from Falls Church, USA · CC BY 2.0

   Frist Art Museum

   An art museum in the art deco post office of 1934, which keeps no permanent collection and mounts borrowed exhibitions instead. The marble hall and the original mail counters were left in place.

   TiqetsKlook
6. 

   6© Thegreenj · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Bicentennial Mall State Park

   A state park laid out for Tennessee's bicentennial in 1996 below the capitol, whose plaza is a granite map of the state — walk across it and you cross the counties. A wall of etched panels runs through the state's history year by year.

   TiqetsKlook
7. 

   7

   Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art

   A 1930s estate of twenty-two hectares built on the fortune from a coffee blend, now a botanical garden and art museum. Contemporary sculpture is sited through the woodland, and the tulips in April are the local event.

   TiqetsKlook
8. 

   8© Chris Faulkner from Nashville, USA · CC BY 2.0

   Opryland USA

   A country music theme park that opened in 1972 beside the Grand Ole Opry house and closed in 1997 to be replaced by a shopping mall — a swap Nashville has argued about ever since. Some of its rides were sold on and are still running elsewhere.

   TiqetsKlook
9. 

   9© Nheyob · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Cathedral of the Incarnation

   The Catholic cathedral of Nashville, built in the early twentieth century in a Renaissance revival on West End Avenue. Its diocese covers a state where Catholics remain a small minority, which is why the building is modest for a cathedral.

   TiqetsKlook
10. 

    10© dave_7 · CC BY 2.0

    Lane Motor Museum

    A museum of over five hundred cars, almost all of them European and most of them odd — microcars, amphibians, propeller-driven prototypes. It is the deliberate opposite of an American muscle car collection and about a hundred and fifty are shown at a time.

    TiqetsKlook

Popular tickets & tours in Nashville

Live products and prices are provided directly by Klook.

KlookOpen Nashville activitiesBrowse tickets & toursKKdayOpen Nashville activitiesBrowse tickets & tours

Trending now

Based on 2025 Wikipedia pageviews — popular places beyond the top 10.

1. 

   1© Jim Bowen from Zhenhai, China · CC BY 2.0

   The Hermitage

   Andrew Jackson's plantation east of Nashville, where he is buried, and where around a hundred and fifty enslaved people worked the cotton. The site now presents their lives alongside his, using the excavated cabins and the estate records.

   TiqetsKlook
2. 

   2© Flick user brent_nashville · CC BY 2.0

   Old Hickory

   A neighbourhood in eastern Davidson County built by DuPont in 1918 as a company town for a gunpowder plant, with housing, a school and a hospital laid out at once. The plant is gone and the village survives.

   TiqetsKlook
3. 

   3© Ramullins42 · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Centennial Park

   A park west of downtown on the site of the 1897 Tennessee centennial exposition, of which the Parthenon replica is the surviving building. It also holds a steam locomotive, a band shell and the lake the fairground was built around.

   TiqetsKlook
4. 

   4© JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ MD · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Fort Nashborough

   A reconstruction on the Cumberland riverfront of the log stockade built in 1779 by the settlers who founded Nashville, when the party arrived by flatboat in a hard winter. The original stood a little downstream and lasted only a few years.

   TiqetsKlook
5. 

   5© David Antis from Nashville, USA · CC BY 2.0

   Mount Olivet Cemetery

   A cemetery of eighty-three hectares laid out in 1856 in the rural cemetery manner, holding seven Tennessee governors, Confederate generals and the founders of the city's commerce. Its Confederate circle is one of the larger such monuments in the South.

   TiqetsKlook
6. 

   6© Michael Rivera · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Johnny Cash Museum

   A museum of Johnny Cash opened in 2013 on Third Avenue, holding the largest collection of his material anywhere — the black stage clothes, the letters, the prison recordings. His son-in-law's family assembled it.

   TiqetsKlook
7. 

   7

   Tennessee State Museum

   The state museum, whose displays run from the mastodon bones and Mississippian pottery through the Cherokee removal to the Civil War and the civil rights movement. It moved into a purpose-built home at the top of the bicentennial mall in 2018.

   TiqetsKlook
8. 

   8© Dclemens1971 · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Christ Presbyterian Church

   A Presbyterian congregation founded in the nineteenth century and now spread over three campuses with about two thousand attending each week — a scale of church that is ordinary in Nashville and startling elsewhere.

   TiqetsKlook
9. 

   9© Andrew Jameson · CC BY-SA 3.0

   St. Mary's Catholic Church

   The oldest church still standing in Nashville, built from 1844 to Adolphus Heiman's Greek Revival design with two fluted Ionic columns across the front. It served as the diocese's cathedral until 1914 and still holds daily Mass downtown.

   TiqetsKlook
10. 

    10

    Shelby Park

    A park on a bend of the Cumberland east of downtown, with surviving bottomland forest and wetland that make it the best bird site in the city. The greenway along the river runs through it and across a pedestrian bridge to the centre.

    TiqetsKlook