Explore Nashville

Hard Rock Cafe Nashville is the music-themed restaurant of the Hard Rock chain at the river end of Lower Broadway, at the corner of 1st Avenue. It serves American dishes and has a bar, a stage for live music and a Rock Shop, and displays guitars and stage clothes of country and rock musicians.

The Johnny Cash Museum on 3rd Avenue South in downtown Nashville opened in 2013 with the approval of the singer's estate. It traces Johnny Cash's life and career through stage clothes, instruments, letters, records and film clips, and includes a stone wall taken from his lake house in Hendersonville.

The John Seigenthaler Pedestrian Bridge is a steel truss bridge of 1909 across the Cumberland River in Nashville, closed to cars in 1998 and reopened for pedestrians and cyclists in 2003. About 960 metres long, it links downtown with East Nashville and the Nissan Stadium, with views of the skyline from its deck.

Ryman Auditorium opened in 1892 as the Union Gospel Tabernacle, a red-brick church hall in downtown Nashville. From 1943 to 1974 it was the home of the Grand Ole Opry radio show, and it remains a concert hall with 2,362 seats and church-pew seating. By day, visitors tour the auditorium, its stage and exhibits on its history.

The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in downtown Nashville collects and presents the history of country music. Chartered in 1964, it moved in 2001 to a building whose windows recall piano keys. It shows instruments, stage costumes, cars and recordings, the Hall of Fame rotunda with its members' plaques, and the Hatch Show Print letterpress shop.

The Tennessee State Capitol, on a hill above downtown Nashville, was designed by William Strickland and built between 1845 and 1859 by skilled artisans, prisoners and enslaved labourers. It houses the General Assembly and the governor's office. Strickland and President James K. Polk are buried on its grounds, and free guided tours show the restored chambers.

The Frist Art Museum opened in 2001 in Nashville's former main post office, an Art Deco building of 1934 near Union Station. It has no permanent collection: its galleries show changing exhibitions of art from around the world and from many periods, and it has a hands-on art studio for families.

The Tennessee State Museum tells the history of Tennessee from its first peoples to the present. Its current building opened in 2018 at the foot of Capitol Hill, beside the Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park. A walk-through Time Tunnel leads past artefacts, documents and objects, and there are changing galleries and a children's gallery.

RCA Studio B on Music Row opened in 1957 and became the centre of the 'Nashville Sound', the polished country style shaped by Chet Atkins. Elvis Presley, Dolly Parton, the Everly Brothers and Roy Orbison recorded here. The Country Music Hall of Fame runs guided tours of the studio, which still has its original recording room.

The Parthenon in Centennial Park is a full-scale replica of the temple in Athens, built for the Tennessee Centennial Exposition of 1897 and rebuilt in concrete in the 1920s and 1930s. It is Nashville's art museum, with a collection of American paintings and, in the main hall, a 13-metre recreation of the Athena Parthenos statue.

Lane Motor Museum, opened in 2003 in a former bakery south-east of downtown Nashville, holds a collection of more than 500 cars and motorcycles, most of them European. About 150 vehicles are shown at a time, from microcars and amphibious vehicles to prototypes, and most are kept in running order.

The Grand Ole Opry House, opened in 1974 at Opryland east of downtown Nashville, is the home of the Grand Ole Opry, the country-music radio show broadcast since 1925. A six-foot circle of wood from the Ryman Auditorium's stage is set into its stage floor. Shows run several nights a week, and backstage tours are held by day.

Travellers Rest is the 1799 home of John Overton, a judge and a founder of Memphis, about 10 km south of downtown Nashville. For decades the plantation was worked by enslaved people. The house museum shows the family rooms, exhibits on the 1864 Battle of Nashville and a grounds tour on the landscape of enslavement.

Belle Meade, about 11 km west of downtown Nashville, was a plantation and thoroughbred horse farm founded in 1807 and run by the Harding and Jackson families for nearly a century, worked by more than a hundred enslaved people. Tours show the 1853 Greek Revival mansion, the outbuildings and the history of those who lived there; the site also has a winery.

Cheekwood is a 22-hectare estate on the western edge of Nashville, built in the 1920s for the Cheek family, whose fortune came from Maxwell House coffee. Since 1960 its Georgian-style mansion has been an art museum and its grounds a botanical garden, with a Japanese garden, a sculpture trail and seasonal displays.