United States · Georgia
Atlanta
The home ground of Martin Luther King Jr and the civil rights movement, and where the South eats best.
Atlanta is the capital of the American South in every sense that counts: the busiest passenger airport in the world, the headquarters city for much of the region's business, and the ground the civil rights movement was organised from, commemorated on the same streets where it happened. It is also unusually green for a big American city, a low ridge town where the tree canopy closes over whole neighbourhoods and a disused railway ring rebuilt as a trail has pulled the best of the eating, drinking and street art into one walkable corridor. Come for the history and the food, and expect to ride or drive more than you would in an older city.
Suggested stay
3–4 days
Language
English
Currency
USD
Timezone
UTC-4
Why you'll love Atlanta
Civil rights this is the movement's home ground, and the sites are the real thing rather than reconstructions - the house where King was born, the church where he preached and the tomb where he lies sit within a few hundred metres of each other.
Food the strongest eating city in the South, running from old-line soul food and lemon pepper wings to a suburban highway corridor of Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese and Central American kitchens.
Music hip-hop's centre of gravity for a quarter of a century, layered over a live scene that fills restored movie palaces, small rock rooms and church halls most nights of the week.
The trail an abandoned rail loop rebuilt as a walking and cycling corridor has become the spine of the city's best neighbourhoods, and is the one part of Atlanta you can properly explore on foot.
Best time to visit
Apr-May, Sep-Oct
23-29° days
33.755° N, 84.390° W
UTC-4 · America/New York
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Weather & when to go to Atlanta
Month by month: typical highs and lows, rainfall and rain days.
✓ Best Apr-May, Sep-Oct
Cards tinted by calculated verdict · big number = typical daily high, small = low · hover for conditions
When to avoid Atlanta
No month is a write-off, but midsummer is hot and sticky with near-daily afternoon thunderstorms, and early spring lays down a coat of yellow pine pollen that anyone with allergies will feel for weeks. Winter is mild rather than cold, though the occasional ice storm brings the freeways to a complete standstill for a day or two.
Top things to do in Atlanta
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Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park - Auburn Avenue end to end
history culture arts ⭐ Highly recommendedA few blocks east of downtown hold the two-storey house where King was born in 1929, the Ebenezer Baptist Church sanctuary where he and his father preached, and the reflecting pool where he and Coretta Scott King are entombed beside an eternal flame. The park service runs the historic side of the street and the King Center the memorial side; give it a morning rather than an hour, and see the fire station and the visitor centre exhibits while you are there.
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Atlanta BeltLine Eastside Trail - walk the old rail corridor
culture arts scenic ⭐ Highly recommendedA freight loop abandoned around the city has been paved into a wide walking and cycling trail, and the eastern stretch is the finished, busy one: it threads Piedmont Park, the old Sears building, Historic Fourth Ward Park, Inman Park and Reynoldstown, past murals, breweries and patios that all face the trail rather than the street. Rent a bike or just walk a segment; it is the single best way to understand how the city has changed.
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Georgia Aquarium - whale sharks in the Ocean Voyager tank
nature wildlife 👍 PopularThe headline exhibit is a vast viewing window onto whale sharks and manta rays, the only whale sharks held outside Asia, with a walk-through tunnel underneath. Beluga whales, sea otters, an African penguin colony and a dolphin presentation fill the rest. It is the anchor of the downtown attraction cluster and it gets very busy at weekends and school holidays.
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World of Coca-Cola - the vault, the bottling line and the tasting room
food culture arts 👍 PopularA brand museum that knows exactly what it is: a steel vault holding the secret formula, a working miniature bottling line, a century of advertising art, and a tasting room pouring roughly a hundred drinks the company sells around the world. The Italian aperitif in the European section is the one everyone dares each other to try.
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Ponce City Market - the old Sears building and its rooftop
food shopping 👍 PopularA colossal 1920s Sears, Roebuck warehouse on Ponce de Leon Avenue, later the city's municipal offices, now a food hall and shopping floor with the BeltLine running along its flank. The rooftop carries a small carnival, a putting green and one of the better skyline views in town, and needs a separate ticket from the market floors below.
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National Center for Civil and Human Rights - sit at the lunch counter
history culture artsThe centrepiece is a sit-in simulation: you put your hands on a counter, wear headphones, and the abuse hurled at the Greensboro and Atlanta student protesters plays around you until you cannot take it any longer. Upstairs the exhibits carry rotating selections from Morehouse College's collection of King's own papers, and connect the American movement to human rights struggles elsewhere.
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High Museum of Art - white porcelain panels and a Piano extension
culture artsRichard Meier's 1983 building is a landmark in its own right, a spiral of ramps behind gleaming white panels, doubled in size by Renzo Piano's later wing. Inside is the largest art collection in the southeast: American and folk art, African art, photography, and travelling shows that pull national attention. It sits inside the Woodruff Arts Center, so the symphony and a theatre share the block.
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Fox Theatre - a Moorish movie palace with a ceiling of stars
culture arts nightlife musicBuilt in 1929 as a Shriners temple and finished as a cinema, the auditorium is a mock Arabian courtyard with striped canopies, minarets and a barrel ceiling of twinkling stars and drifting clouds. Its enormous theatre organ still rises out of the pit before shows. A grassroots campaign saved it from demolition in the 1970s, and it now runs touring musicals and concerts year round.
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Piedmont Park - the skyline view and the botanical garden next door
nature wildlife scenicMidtown's front lawn, laid out on the grounds of an 1895 international exposition, with a lake, sports fields and a rise that gives the classic postcard view of the towers over open grass. The Atlanta Botanical Garden occupies the northern corner, where a suspended canopy walkway carries you through the treetops of an urban forest and the orchid house is worth the detour on a wet day.
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Oakland Cemetery - Victorian funerary sculpture under the towers
history scenicFounded in 1850 and now completely surrounded by the city, a garden cemetery of brick paths, magnolias and elaborate Victorian mausoleums with the downtown skyline rising behind them. Margaret Mitchell and the golfer Bobby Jones are buried here, along with a large Confederate section and the African American Grounds, and volunteers run walking tours that read the whole city's history off the headstones.
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Atlanta History Center - the Cyclorama and the Swan House
history culture artsThe Buckhead campus holds a restored panoramic painting of the Battle of Atlanta, a cylinder of canvas longer than a football pitch that you view from a rotating platform, with the retouching that turned it into Lost Cause propaganda now explained rather than hidden. The grounds also carry the 1920s Swan House mansion and a working nineteenth-century farm.
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Buford Highway - the international restaurant corridor
food off beaten pathA hard, unlovely suburban road north-east of the centre lined with strip malls that hold some of the best eating in the metro: Korean barbecue and tofu houses, Sichuan and Cantonese kitchens, Vietnamese pho counters, Salvadoran pupuserias and Mexican taquerias, plus enormous Asian and Latin supermarkets. You need a car or a rideshare, and it is worth both.
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Little Five Points - record shops, thrift stores and a rock room
nightlife music shoppingThe city's punk and bohemian corner, a couple of intersecting blocks east of downtown with vinyl and comic shops, costume and vintage stores, a bar you enter through a giant metal skull, and a converted cinema that has been the neighbourhood's live music room for decades. Best on a weekend afternoon, and an easy walk from the trail.
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Mercedes-Benz Stadium - a Falcons or Atlanta United match
culture artsThe retractable roof opens like a camera aperture over a downtown stadium shared by the NFL team and a football club whose crowds regularly top anything else in the league. It is also the rare American venue that deliberately keeps concession prices low, which has made a hot dog and a soda part of the visiting experience. Match days aside, guided tours run through the week.
Best areas to stay in Atlanta
$ Budget $$ Mid-range $$$ Premium
Midtown
First-time visitors $$High-rise arts district beside the big park
Explore hotels in Midtown →
Downtown
Attractions on foot $$Attractions, stadiums and convention-centre bustle
Explore hotels in Downtown →
Old Fourth Ward and Inman Park
Food and the trail $$Victorian streets on the trail's best stretch
Explore hotels in Old Fourth Ward and Inman Park →
Buckhead
Upscale and shopping $$$Moneyed towers, malls and leafy estates
Explore hotels in Buckhead →
Decatur
Families and food $$Small-town square with outsized eating
Explore hotels in Decatur →
Live nightly prices from Booking.com, Agoda and others, centred on Atlanta
Getting to & around Atlanta
Getting there
Fly into Hartsfield-Jackson, then about 20 minutes on the train straight into downtown.
Flight
Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL)
Roughly 16 km south of downtown, and the busiest passenger airport in the world, so allow for scale rather than distance. A rail station sits inside the domestic terminal at the end of the line: the Red and Gold trains run north to the Five Points interchange in about 20 minutes, then on to Midtown and Buckhead. Arriving from abroad you land at the international terminal on the far side of the airfield and cross underground on the automated Plane Train to reach it. Rideshare and taxis take 20-30 minutes to the centre outside peak hours and much longer inside them.
Train
Atlanta Peachtree Station
One long-distance service calls here, the overnight train between New York and New Orleans, and it uses a small station in Brookwood north of Midtown rather than a central terminus. There is no rail interchange at the door, so plan on a rideshare or a bus onward.
Coach
Intercity coaches link Atlanta with Birmingham, Nashville, Charlotte, Savannah and Jacksonville. Boarding points have shifted around the city in recent years and different operators use different curbs, so confirm where your specific service actually departs from before the day.
Drive
Two interstates run together through the middle of town as the Downtown Connector, a third crosses east to west, and a ring road circles the whole metro. Locals divide the city into inside the Perimeter and outside it, and that ring is the reference point for almost every direction you will be given.
Getting around
MARTA rail
Four colour-coded lines running on just two corridors that cross at Five Points downtown. Excellent for the airport, downtown, Midtown, Buckhead and Decatur, and of little use for anything off those two spines.
TBC
MARTA bus
Fills the enormous gaps between the rail lines and reaches the neighbourhoods trains skip. Frequencies vary a lot by route, so check a live arrival before committing to one.
TBC
Atlanta Streetcar
A short downtown loop linking the Olympic park end of the centre with the King historic district along Auburn Avenue. Useful for exactly that one journey and nothing else.
TBC
BeltLine trail
The paved rail-trail is a genuine transport route on the east side, connecting Midtown, the Old Fourth Ward, Inman Park and Reynoldstown on foot or by bike faster than driving between them.
Free
Rideshare and taxi
The default for most trips here, and the only practical way to reach the international restaurant corridor, the western neighbourhoods or anything outside the ring road.
TBC
Car
Atlanta was built around its freeways and most locals drive everything. Rush hour on the Connector and the ring road is as bad as its reputation, and downtown street parking is scarce, so a car earns its keep only for day trips.
TBC
Day trips from Atlanta
Stone Mountain Park
Half dayGranite dome
An enormous bald granite dome rising straight out of the pine forest east of the city, with a walk-up trail that takes about an hour and a cable car for everyone else. The north face carries a vast Confederate relief carving completed in the twentieth century as a segregation-era statement, and the park's handling of it remains contested; the geology, the lake loop and the summit view stand on their own.
Getting there
car | bus | tour
About 30-40 min by car east, or a bus connection from the rail line
Athens
Full dayCollege music town
A university town that produced a remarkable run of bands in the 1980s and still runs on live music, with the venues that made its name clustered in a compact brick downtown. Add the botanical garden, the antebellum houses on Milledge Avenue and a campus that is one of the oldest in the country.
Getting there
car
About 1 hr 15 min by car north-east
North Georgia mountains
Full dayWaterfalls and wine
The southern end of the Appalachians starts barely an hour north. Dahlonega was the site of an American gold rush two decades before California and is now the centre of Georgia's wine country; Amicalola Falls drops in a long cascade nearby, and the approach trail to the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail starts from its base.
Getting there
car | tour
About 1 hr 15 min to 1 hr 30 min by car north
Chattanooga
Full dayRiver city
Just over the Tennessee line, a former industrial city rebuilt around its riverfront: a large freshwater aquarium, a long pedestrian bridge over the Tennessee River, and Lookout Mountain above it with an incline railway, a cave waterfall deep inside the rock and Civil War battlefields along the ridge.
Getting there
car
About 2 hr by car north-west
Savannah
2 daysColonial coast
Georgia's coastal city, laid out in 1733 as a grid of leafy squares that survived the Civil War intact, with Spanish moss, ironwork balconies and a riverfront of old cotton warehouses. Too far and too good to rush, so give it an overnight and take in Tybee Island or the coastal marshes while you are down there.
Getting there
car
About 4 hr by car south-east
A little history of Atlanta
Atlanta has no river, no port and no natural reason to exist. It was staked out in 1837 as the southern end of a state-built railroad and called Terminus, and almost everything since has followed from that: it grew as a junction, which is why Sherman burned it in 1864, and why it later became the airline hub with the busiest passenger airport on earth. The city seal carries a phoenix and the word Resurgens, rising again, which locals quote with only mild irony.
The second thread is Black Atlanta. Auburn Avenue became one of the wealthiest Black business streets in America in the early twentieth century, and the cluster of historically Black colleges on the west side supplied much of the civil rights movement's leadership. Martin Luther King Jr. was born on Auburn Avenue, was ordained at his father's church there and is buried a few doors from both. White business leaders, anxious above all to protect the city's growth, chose accommodation over resistance and marketed Atlanta as the city too busy to hate, a slogan that was always half public relations and half hard calculation. Maynard Jackson's election in 1973 made this the first major Southern city with a Black mayor, and the airport expansion, the Olympics and the film industry that followed were all built on that base.
Surveyors stake the end of the Western and Atlantic Railroad; the settlement is called Terminus.
The town is chartered as Atlanta, after two earlier names and ten years of railway building.
The Battle of Atlanta is fought in July; Sherman takes the city, then burns its military and industrial core before marching to the sea.
The state government moves here from Milledgeville, making Atlanta the capital of Georgia.
A local pharmacist mixes the first batch of Coca-Cola, sold by the glass at a downtown soda fountain.
The Cotton States and International Exposition opens on the grounds that become Piedmont Park.
White mobs attack Black residents and businesses over several days, killing dozens in the Atlanta race massacre.
Martin Luther King Jr. is born on Auburn Avenue; the Fox Theatre opens the same year.
Gone with the Wind premieres downtown, with its Black cast members barred from the segregated theatre.
King is assassinated in Memphis and buried in Atlanta after a funeral at Ebenezer Baptist Church.
Maynard Jackson is elected the first Black mayor of a major Southern city.
The first MARTA rail line opens, giving the metro its rapid transit spine.
Ted Turner launches the first round-the-clock television news network from Atlanta.
The city hosts the Centennial Olympic Games, remaking downtown around a new central park.
The BeltLine's Eastside Trail opens and begins reshaping the neighbourhoods around it.
Know before you go
Payment
Cards everywhere
English
Everywhere
Wifi
Reliable
Power
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120 V, 60 Hz
Dialing
+1
Mobile network & SIM card
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FAQs about Atlanta
▸ When is the best time to visit Atlanta?
April and May, or September and October. Spring brings dogwoods and azaleas with warm days that have not yet turned humid, and autumn holds the warmth without the thunderstorms while the mountains north of the city turn colour. Midsummer is hot and heavy, and winter is mild but grey.
▸ How many days do you need in Atlanta?
Three to four. One day covers the downtown attraction cluster, one the civil rights sites on Auburn Avenue, and one the BeltLine with Midtown's museums and park. Add a further day if you want to get out to Stone Mountain or the mountains.
▸ Do you need a car in Atlanta?
Not if you stay in Midtown or downtown and stick to the rail line, the streetcar and the BeltLine, with rideshares filling the gaps. You will want one for the international restaurant corridor, the western neighbourhoods and any day trip, since almost nothing outside the two rail corridors is reachable without driving.
▸ Is Atlanta expensive?
Less than the big coastal cities. Hotel rates, restaurant bills and transit fares all sit below New York, Washington or Los Angeles levels, and the aquarium and the branded attractions are the line items that add up rather than the everyday costs.
▸ Is Atlanta safe?
Broadly yes, with the ordinary big-American-city caveats. Crime is very unevenly distributed, so the practical advice is the usual one: stay aware around downtown at night, do not leave anything visible in a parked car, and use a rideshare rather than walking long distances after dark through empty commercial blocks.
▸ What is Atlanta known for?
The civil rights movement and its memorials, Coca-Cola, the world's busiest airport, hip-hop, and a film industry big enough that people call it the Hollywood of the South. Locals would add the tree canopy and the fact that the city sits in a forest.
▸ Is the airport worth building a layover around?
Only with real time on the clock. The rail line runs from inside the domestic terminal to downtown in about 20 minutes, so a long layover can just about buy you the civil rights museum or the Olympic park, but anything under about five hours is not worth leaving the airport for.
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