Explore Dallas

Dealey Plaza is a city park in the West End Historic District of downtown Dallas, named after the newspaper publisher George Dealey and sometimes called the birthplace of Dallas. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated here on 22 November 1963 as his motorcade passed along Elm Street; the plaza and the surrounding buildings form a National Historic Landmark district.

The Sixth Floor Museum is in the former Texas School Book Depository, a 1901 brick warehouse on Dealey Plaza in Dallas, from whose sixth floor President John F. Kennedy was shot on 22 November 1963. Opened in 1989, its main exhibition uses films, photographs and objects to document his presidency, the assassination and the investigations that followed.

Reunion Tower is a 171-metre (561 ft) observation tower in the Reunion district of downtown Dallas, designed by Welton Becket & Associates and opened in 1978 together with the neighbouring Hyatt Regency hotel. Glass-walled lifts rise to the GeO-Deck, an indoor and outdoor viewing level at 470 feet, beneath the restaurant inside the illuminated geodesic sphere.

The Dallas World Aquarium is an aquarium and zoo in the West End Historic District of Dallas, opened in 1992 in a gutted 1924 warehouse. Visitors walk down through Orinoco, a recreated South American rainforest with birds, primates and manatees, the Mundo Maya hall with a shark tunnel, the Cloud Forest Trek and saltwater tanks from around the world.

The Perot Museum of Nature and Science is a natural history and science museum in Victory Park, Dallas, named after Margot and Ross Perot and opened here in December 2012. Thom Mayne of Morphosis designed the building as a large cube over a planted base, with an escalator in a glass tube outside; it has 11 permanent exhibit halls, including a children's museum.

The Dallas Museum of Art is an art museum in the Dallas Arts District, housed since 1984 in a limestone building by Edward Larrabee Barnes after the museum left Fair Park. Its collection of more than 24,000 objects runs from the third millennium BC to the present day, and its research library holds over 50,000 volumes.

The Nasher Sculpture Center is a museum of modern and contemporary sculpture in the Dallas Arts District, opened in 2003 next to the Dallas Museum of Art. Renzo Piano designed its stone and glass galleries and Peter Walker the garden; the Raymond and Patsy Nasher collection includes works by Rodin, Matisse, Picasso, Giacometti, Calder and Henry Moore.

The Dallas Zoo, founded in 1888, is a 106-acre zoo in Marsalis Park, about 5 km south of downtown Dallas, run by the Dallas Zoological Society. It keeps more than 2,000 animals of over 400 species; in the Giants of the Savanna area elephants, giraffes, zebras and antelopes share one landscape, and the zoo has gorilla and chimpanzee habitats.

The George W. Bush Presidential Center holds the library and museum of George W. Bush, the 43rd US president, on the Southern Methodist University campus in University Park, within Dallas. Opened in 2013, the museum has a replica Oval Office, an exhibit on 11 September 2001 and the Decision Points Theater, beside a 15-acre native Texas park.

The Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden covers 66 acres on the south-eastern shore of White Rock Lake in East Dallas and opened in 1984. It has 19 named gardens, among them A Woman's Garden and the Rory Meyers Children's Adventure Garden, and includes the DeGolyer House, a Spanish Colonial Revival estate of 1939, and the 1938 Camp House.