Houston

Top things to do in Houston

1. 01

   Space Center Houston - Mission Control, a Saturn V and a shuttle on a jumbo jet

   history culture arts ⭐ Highly recommended

   The visitor side of NASA's Johnson Space Center, out towards Clear Lake southeast of the city. The tram tour is the reason to come: it runs onto the working campus to the Apollo-era Mission Control room, restored to how it looked on the night of the first Moon landing, and to Rocket Park, where a genuine Saturn V lies on its side in a purpose-built shed, so vast that it takes a while to accept the scale. Back at the centre, Independence Plaza lets you walk through a full-size shuttle replica mounted on top of the actual Boeing 747 that used to ferry orbiters across the country. Allow well over half a day, and go early.

2. 02

   Bellaire Boulevard and the Mahatma Gandhi District - the real Houston food argument

   food ⭐ Highly recommended

   Houston's Asiatown is not a few blocks but several miles of shopping centres along Bellaire Boulevard in the southwest: Vietnamese pho and banh mi counters, Sichuan and Taiwanese dining rooms, bakeries, tea shops and a food hall in a mall the size of an airport terminal. This is also where Viet-Cajun crawfish was worked out, a garlic-butter-and-lemongrass reinvention of the Louisiana boil that Crawfish and Noodles made famous. A few minutes north on Hillcroft, the Mahatma Gandhi District does the same job for South Asian food and sari shops. For the two other Houston plates, Ninfa's on Navigation is where the fajita was popularised in 1973, and the barbecue argument runs between Truth, Gatlin's and Killen's out in Pearland.

3. 03

   The Menil Collection - a world-class museum in a residential street, free to walk into

   culture arts

   John and Dominique de Menil's collection sits in a low Renzo Piano building of grey clapboard and louvred light, in a Montrose neighbourhood of bungalows the family painted the same grey. Surrealism is the heart of it - Magritte and Ernst in depth - alongside antiquities, Byzantine work and a serious African and Oceanic collection, hung sparsely and with no wall text to speak of. Admission is free, it is never crowded, and the campus spreads across several blocks with a Cy Twombly gallery and a drawing institute of its own.

4. 04

   Rothko Chapel - fourteen paintings, an octagonal room and a broken obelisk

   culture arts

   A windowless brick octagon a short walk from the Menil, holding fourteen enormous near-black Rothko canvases that the artist made for the space and never saw installed. It is not a museum piece but a working non-denominational chapel, silent, with a skylight that changes the paintings as clouds pass, and the panels resolve slowly the longer you sit. Outside, Barnett Newman's rust-coloured Broken Obelisk stands in a reflecting pool, dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr.

5. 05

   Museum of Fine Arts, Houston - and the light tunnel between the buildings

   culture arts 👍 Popular

   One of the largest art museums in the country, split across a Mies van der Rohe wing, a Rafael Moneo building and a newer contemporary block, with a sculpture garden by Isamu Noguchi in between. The connecting piece everybody remembers is the underground walkway between two of the buildings, a James Turrell installation where the tunnel walls glow and shift through colour as you move along a moving walkway. The collection is genuinely broad - Renaissance to Latin American modernism to a strong photography holding - and general admission is free one day a week.

6. 06

   Houston Museum of Natural Science - the dinosaur hall and the glass butterfly cone

   nature wildlife culture arts 👍 Popular

   In Hermann Park, and much better than the average city science museum. The paleontology hall stages its skeletons mid-action rather than standing in rows, so a Tyrannosaurus lunges over a Triceratops as you walk under them; there is a hall of ancient Egypt, a gem and mineral collection that is one of the best anywhere, and a planetarium. The Cockrell Butterfly Center is a three-storey glass cone of rainforest with a waterfall and several thousand free-flying butterflies, and the insect gallery below it is not for the squeamish.

7. 07

   Hermann Park and the Houston Zoo - the city's green middle

   nature wildlife scenic 👍 Popular

   Four hundred-odd acres between the Museum District and the Texas Medical Center, with a statue of Sam Houston on horseback at the gate. The zoo takes up one corner, there are pedal boats on the lake, a miniature railroad that children take very seriously, a Japanese garden and a walled garden with a spiral mount you can climb for a view over the live oaks. Miller Outdoor Theatre is here too, an open-sided stage that runs a free programme of concerts, ballet and touring theatre through the warmer months, with a grass hill where everyone spreads out blankets.

8. 08

   Buffalo Bayou Park - bats under the bridge and a cistern under the lawn

   nature wildlife scenic off beaten path

   The bayou the city was founded on runs west from downtown through a long landscaped park of trails, meadows and kayak launches. Two things make it worth timing. Under the Waugh Drive bridge lives a colony of a few hundred thousand Mexican free-tailed bats that pours out at dusk, year-round, watched from the bank and the bridge deck above. And below the grass sits the Cistern, a decommissioned 1920s drinking-water reservoir the size of a city block, its 221 concrete columns standing in a film of water under a very long echo, now opened for guided visits and light installations.

9. 09

   The Museum District walk - nineteen institutions in a square mile

   culture arts history

   Beyond the two big museums, the district holds the Contemporary Arts Museum in its stainless-steel parallelogram, Holocaust Museum Houston, the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum, a children's museum that is a genuinely good rainy-day option, and the Asia Society's serene Yoshio Taniguchi building. Rice University's live-oak campus sits at the southern edge, and on it James Turrell's Twilight Epiphany Skyspace opens its roof to the sky for a slow colour sequence at sunrise and sunset, free but worth booking. About half the district's museums charge nothing at all.

10. 10

    Downtown Theater District and the tunnel system

    culture arts nightlife music

    Houston keeps permanent resident companies in opera, ballet, symphony and theatre, all within a few downtown blocks - the opera and ballet in the Wortham Center, the symphony in Jones Hall, the Alley Theatre in its fortress-like concrete building next door. Underneath all of it runs the tunnel system: roughly six miles of air-conditioned passages linking most of the towers, lined with lunch counters and shops, busy on weekday middles and completely deserted at weekends. There are no obvious street entrances, so you go down through a building lobby or a garage.

11. 11

    The Astrodome and NRG Park - the Eighth Wonder of the World, still standing

    history culture arts

    The world's first domed, air-conditioned stadium opened in 1965 and changed what a stadium could be; when the roof panels were painted over to stop the glare blinding fielders, the grass died and artificial turf was invented to replace it, taking the building's name with it. It sits empty now beside the much larger NRG Stadium, saved from demolition but with no settled use, and you can only look at it from outside. The park around it fills for about three weeks in late winter with the largest livestock show and rodeo in the world, complete with a carnival, a barbecue cook-off and a stadium concert every night.

12. 12

    Gerald D. Hines Waterwall Park - a sixty-foot horseshoe of falling water

    scenic shopping

    At the foot of Philip Johnson's Williams Tower in Uptown, a semicircular wall pours water down both its inner and outer faces into a sunken bowl ringed by live oaks. Standing inside the horseshoe, the noise blots out the freeway completely, which is the entire point. It is free, floodlit at night, and permanently full of wedding and quinceanera photo shoots. The Galleria, the largest shopping centre in Texas and one with a full ice rink at its heart, is a few minutes away.

13. 13

    The Orange Show and the Beer Can House - Houston's folk-art streak

    culture arts off beaten path

    A postman named Jeff McKissack spent more than twenty years turning an east-side lot into a maze of tiled terraces, wheels and mosaic walkways in honour of the orange, which he believed was the key to a long life. Across town, John Milkovisch clad his entire house in flattened beer cans, tens of thousands of them, with curtains of pull-tabs that ring in the wind. The same organisation that keeps them both running stages the world's largest art car parade through downtown each spring, which tells you most of what you need to know about the city's sense of humour.

14. 14

    Discovery Green - downtown's front lawn

    scenic food

    Twelve acres of park opposite the convention centre, dropped into what had been surface parking, with a lake, big shade trees, a playground, a reading room and public art. It hosts free concerts and markets, turns part of itself into an ice rink over winter, and is the easiest place downtown to sit outside without a reason. The baseball park and the basketball arena are both a short walk away, so it doubles as the pre-game gathering ground.

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