Seattle

Blink and it’s changed: Seattle can be that ephemeral. Welcome to a city that heralds innovation and nature; a city always marching toward the future.

Local Flavor

First time in Seattle? Make a beeline for its proverbial pantry: Pike Place Market. It was founded in 1907 to fortify locals with fresh Northwest produce, and its long-held mantra of ‘meet the producer’ still echoes enthusiastically around a city where every restaurateur worth their salt knows the name of their fishmonger and the biography of the cow that became yesterday’s burgers. It doesn’t take long to realize that you’ve arrived in a city of well-educated palates and wildly experimental chefs who are willing to fuse American cuisine with just about anything – as long as it’s local.

A United States of Neighborhoods

Visitors setting out to explore Seattle should think of the city as a United States of Neighborhoods or – to put it in more human terms – a family consisting of affectionate but sometimes errant members. There’s the aloof, elegant one (Queen Anne), the social butterfly (Capitol Hill), the artistic, bearded one (Fremont), the effortlessly cool one (Ballard), the grizzled old patriarch (Pioneer Square), the precocious adolescent still carving out its identity (South Lake Union) and the one who lives out of town (West Seattle). You’ll never fully understand Seattle until you’ve spent a bit of time with them all.

Micro-businesses

To outsiders, Seattle is an industrious creator of macro-brands. To insiders, it’s a city of micro-businesses and boundary-pushing grassroots movements. For proof, dip into the third-wave coffee shops, the microbreweries with their casual tasting rooms or the cozy informal bookstores that remain rock solid in a city that spawned Amazon. Then there are the latest national trends that Seattle has helped popularize: craft cider, weed dispensaries, specialist pie-makers, vegan ice cream that's actually good, and chic donuts, to name a few. Hit the streets and you'll see there’s far more to this city than Starbucks, Nordstrom and Boeing.

A Walk on the Weird Side

Seattle's current reputation as the town that spawned Amazon and Starbucks won't give you the full picture of the city's oddball cultural heritage. Crisscross its urban grid and you’ll find all kinds of apparitions: a rocket sticking out of a building; a museum built to resemble a smashed-up electric guitar; glass orbs in wooden canoes; a statue of Lenin; a mural made of used chewing gum; fish-tossing market traders; and a museum dedicated to antique pinball machines (that you can still play). Need help acclimating? The city's still-booming legal weed market will help you embrace your own weird side.

Must see in
Seattle

  • Pike Place Market

    Way more than just a market, 110-year-old Pike Place is a living community, a cabaret show, a way of life and an intrinsic piece of Seattle’s soul. Strolling through its clamorous, sometimes chaotic thoroughfares, you simply couldn’t be in any other city. There are fish that fly, shops that look like they’ve sprung from a Harry Potter movie, an art wall made out of chewing gum, and a multitude of lively old buskers jamming acoustic versions of Led Zeppelin songs outside the world's oldest Starbucks. Pure magic.

  • Space Needle

    The city icon that is as synonymous with Seattle as the letters S-E-A-T-T-L-E was built for the 1962 World’s Fair, and in 2018 got a face-lift to bring it into a new era. Although it's no longer Seattle's tallest structure, one million annual visitors still squeeze into the Space Needle’s slick, speedy elevators to enjoy views that are best described as awesome. Granted, tickets are expensive and you'll be elbow-to-elbow with tourists, but stop complaining and get in line: this is an essential Seattle pilgrimage.

  • Museum of Pop Culture

    Paying homage to the left-handed, guitar-burning musical genius that was Jimi Hendrix, the architecturally bizarre Museum of Pop Culture is the brainchild of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. It's an apt memorial to a region that has been a powerful musical innovator since the days of local boy Bing Crosby. Come and see the legends and how they were created, from Hendrix to Kurt Cobain, or experiment with your own riffs in the interactive Sound Lab. Marrying Captain Kirk with Nirvana Kurt is the on-site 'Infinite Worlds of Science Fiction' exhibit, where Star Trek meets Doctor Who.

  • Public Art

    Seattle likes to display its art out in the open with no holds barred. Sculptures and statues decorate parks, streets and squares, from the weird (a stone troll underneath a bridge), to the iconic (Hendrix in classic rock-and-roll pose), to the existential (a group of people waiting for a bus that never comes). The city even has its own sculpture park, an outpost of the Seattle Art Museum that spreads its works across a beautifully landscaped outdoor space overlooking glassy Elliott Bay.

  • Discovery Park

    Seattle justifies its ‘Emerald City’ moniker in the rugged confines of 534-acre Discovery Park, a one-time military installation reborn as a textbook example of urban sustainability. Speckled with Douglas fir trees, hunting eagles, log-littered beaches and wild meadows, it resembles a lonely tract of Pacific Northwestern wilderness picked up and dropped into the middle of a crowded metropolitan area. Come here for breathing space, coexistence with nature, and a chance to slow down and reflect on the magic that lured people to Seattle in the first place.

  • Museum of Flight

    Even people with absolutely no interest in aviation have been known to blink in quiet astonishment at the Museum of Flight, which tells the tale of how humankind got from the Wright Brothers to the first moon landing in less than 66 years. Get ready for an exciting jet-propelled journey through war, peace, space rockets and inspired engineering, eloquently related with the aid of film, words, flight simulators, famous decommissioned aircraft, and a man called William E Boeing, who transformed how we travel and the city of Seattle itself.

Explore Seattle

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Featured Story

Chef Zoi Antonitsas takes us on a tour of Seattle's food scene

5 min read — Published June 8th, 2016

Lauren FinneyWriter

Acclaimed chef Zoi Antonitsas takes us on a tour of her hometown’s eclectic food scene, from farms, food trucks and taverns to the best brunches, fine…

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