Explore Charlotte

Discovery Place Science is a hands-on science and technology museum on North Tryon Street in Uptown Charlotte, opened in 1981 and renovated in 2010. Its exhibits cover physics, the human body, engineering and the natural world, with a rainforest, an aquarium and live animals, and the Charlotte Observer IMAX Dome theatre shows films on a domed screen.

The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art in Uptown Charlotte opened in 2010 in a terracotta-clad building by the Swiss architect Mario Botta, part of the Levine Center for the Arts. It shows the collection of the Bechtler family of Zurich, about 1,400 works of mid-20th-century modernism by artists such as Giacometti, Miró, Picasso, Warhol and Tinguely.

Mint Museum Uptown opened in 2010 on South Tryon Street, part of the Levine Center for the Arts. The Mint Museum, founded in 1936 as North Carolina's first art museum in the former Charlotte branch of the US Mint, shows here its collections of American and contemporary art, European art, and craft and design, while the original building on Randolph Road houses its other collections.

The NASCAR Hall of Fame in Uptown Charlotte opened in 2010 and honours drivers, crew chiefs, team owners and others from the history of American stock-car racing. Behind its facade wrapped in a stainless-steel ribbon, it shows race cars on a banked ramp called Glory Road, interactive racing simulators, a pit-stop challenge and the Hall of Honor.

The Billy Graham Library, opened in 2007 at the headquarters of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association in south-west Charlotte, documents the life and ministry of the evangelist Billy Graham, who grew up on a dairy farm nearby. The building is designed as a dairy barn; exhibits follow his crusades, and his restored family home and the graves of Graham and his wife Ruth are on the grounds.