Memphis travel guide

Top 10 sights in Memphis

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

1. 

   1© John Phelan · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Blues Hall of Fame

   A museum at 421 South Main Street run by the Blues Foundation, opened in 2015 for a hall of fame that had inducted members on paper since 1980. Listening galleries let visitors play the recordings, albums and books that were inducted.

   TiqetsKlook
2. 

   2

   SS Sultana

   A Mississippi steamboat that exploded near Memphis on 27 April 1865, killing about 1,164 people — mostly Union prisoners just released from Andersonville — in the worst maritime disaster in American history. Overloaded to six times her licensed capacity, she was barely reported because Lincoln had been shot twelve days earlier.

   TiqetsKlook
3. 

   3© Unicurse · CC BY 3.0

   Memphis Zoo

   A zoo in Overton Park since April 1906, holding 3,500 animals of over 500 species on thirty-two hectares. It was one of only four US zoos with giant pandas from 2003 to 2023, and its 1909 Egyptian Revival entrance arch survives.

   TiqetsKlook
4. 

   4© Matthew T Rader · CC BY-SA 4.0

   National Civil Rights Museum

   A museum built around the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King was shot on the balcony outside room 306 on 4 April 1968. The room and the two cars below are kept as they were, and the exhibition runs from the slave trade to the present across two buildings.

   TiqetsKlook
5. 

   5

   Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception

   The Catholic cathedral of Memphis, built between 1925 and 1938 in Romanesque Revival with a rose window six metres across. It stands on Central Avenue in the Annesdale district, and the diocese was created in 1970 around it.

   TiqetsKlook
6. 

   6© Michael Gäbler · CC BY 3.0

   Memphis Brooks Museum of Art

   The oldest and largest art museum in Tennessee, opened in 1916 in Overton Park, with European painting from the Italian Renaissance onward and a strong American collection. A new building downtown on the river is due to replace it.

   TiqetsKlook
7. 

   7© Thomas R Machnitzki · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Memphis Rock N' Soul Museum

   A Smithsonian-affiliated museum at 191 Beale Street tracing how field hollers and gospel became rock and soul in this city. Its audio guide carries a hundred songs and plays whatever exhibit you stand in front of.

   TiqetsKlook
8. 

   8© Thomas R Machnitzki (thomas@machnitzki.com) · CC BY 3.0

   Overton Park

   A 138-hectare park in Midtown laid out by George Kessler in 1901, with a twenty-four-hectare stand of old-growth forest never cleared. A citizens' campaign stopped Interstate 40 from being driven through it, winning a US Supreme Court case in 1971.

   TiqetsKlook
9. 

   9© Temple Israel (Memphis, Tennessee) · CC BY 3.0

   Temple Israel

   A Reform congregation founded in 1853, the oldest Jewish congregation in Memphis, and one of the largest Reform synagogues in the South. Its present building on East Massey Road opened in 1976.

   TiqetsKlook
10. 

    10© No machine-readable author provided. JeremyA assumed (based on copyright claims) · CC BY-SA 2.5

    Metal Museum

    A museum of fine metalwork on a bluff above the Mississippi, in what were the buildings of a marine hospital. A working blacksmith's forge and foundry stand in the grounds, and visiting smiths make pieces in front of the public.

    TiqetsKlook

Popular tickets & tours in Memphis

Live products and prices are provided directly by Klook.

KlookOpen Memphis activitiesBrowse tickets & toursKKdayOpen Memphis activitiesBrowse tickets & tours

Trending now

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

1. 

   1© Zereshk at English Wikipedia · CC BY 2.5

   Mud Island

   A peninsula between the Mississippi and the Wolf River, holding a park with a scale model of the lower Mississippi — 1.6 kilometres of flowing concrete channel, five city blocks per river mile. The steamboat museum and an amphitheatre are on it.

   TiqetsKlook
2. 

   2© Thomas R Machnitzki · CC BY 3.0

   Frayser

   A neighbourhood in north Memphis named after a nineteenth-century physician, developed as a white working-class suburb around a Ford plant and now largely African American. Elvis Presley lived in public housing here before Graceland.

   TiqetsKlook
3. 

   3© Victor Chapa from Denton, USA · CC BY 2.0

   Stax Museum

   A museum on the site of the Stax studio at 926 East McLemore Avenue, rebuilt to the original plan after the building was demolished in 1989. The label recorded Otis Redding, Booker T. and Isaac Hayes with an integrated house band in a converted cinema, and the sloping floor is reproduced.

   TiqetsKlook
4. 

   4© Thomas R Machnitzki (http://nutbush.machnitzki.com) · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Shelby Farms

   A park of 1,800 hectares in east Memphis, five times the size of Central Park and one of the largest urban parks in the United States. It was a penal farm until 1964; a herd of American bison has grazed here since 1989.

   TiqetsKlook
5. 

   5

   Fort Prudhomme

   A stockade thrown up in February 1682 on one of the Chickasaw Bluffs by La Salle's canoe expedition down the Mississippi, named after a gunsmith who got lost while hunting. Its exact site is still argued over; the party waited ten days for him and he turned up.

   TiqetsKlook
6. 

   6

   Fort Assumption

   A French fort of 1739 on the fourth Chickasaw Bluff, built as the base for a campaign against the Chickasaw that ended in a negotiated truce. It was abandoned within a year and only a marker stands in downtown Memphis.

   TiqetsKlook
7. 

   7© Thomas R Machnitzki · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Dixon Gallery and Gardens

   An art museum in the Georgian house of a cotton broker, set in seven hectares of gardens and opened to the public in 1976. French Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings are the strength, with the formal English gardens laid out in the 1940s.

   TiqetsKlook
8. 

   8© KENPEI · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Memphis Botanic Garden

   A 39-hectare garden in Audubon Park with more than twenty themed areas, including a Japanese garden of 1963 with a drum bridge and koi pond. Its Big Backyard is one of the larger children's gardens in the country.

   TiqetsKlook
9. 

   9

   T. O. Fuller State Park

   The only state park inside Memphis, 1,138 acres of woodland in the south of the city. Built in 1938 by an all-Black Civilian Conservation Corps camp, it was the first state park east of the Mississippi open to African Americans; digging for a pool in 1940 uncovered the prehistoric village now shown as Chucalissa.

   TiqetsKlook
10. 

    10© Thomas R Machnitzki · CC BY-SA 3.0

    The Cotton Museum

    A museum on the old trading floor of the Memphis Cotton Exchange at 65 Union Avenue, opened in 2006. The chalk quotation boards and the telegraph desks are as they were left in 1978, when trading moved to screens.

    TiqetsKlook