Explore St. Louis

The Old Courthouse is a former federal and state courthouse in downtown St. Louis, begun in 1839 in Greek Revival style and given its cast-iron dome in the 1860s. Dred Scott's suit for freedom was heard here in 1847 and 1850. Part of Gateway Arch National Park, it reopened in 2025 after renovation with four museum galleries and restored courtrooms.

The Gateway Arch is a 192-metre stainless-steel arch on the west bank of the Mississippi in St. Louis, built in 1963–1965 to a 1947 design by Eero Saarinen as a monument to the westward expansion of the United States. Small tram cars inside its legs carry visitors to an observation room at the top, and a museum beneath it covers the city's role in that expansion.

The Anheuser-Busch Brewery is the company's original brewery in the Soulard area of south St. Louis, where Budweiser has been brewed since the 1870s. The 57-hectare complex of red-brick buildings, among them the Brew House of 1891–1892, is a National Historic Landmark. Guided tours visit the Brew House, the stables of the Clydesdale horses and the finishing cellars.

The Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis is the Catholic cathedral of the Archdiocese of St. Louis, on Lindell Boulevard in the Central West End. Built from 1907 and dedicated in 1914, it has a Romanesque Revival exterior with a green-tiled dome and two towers. Its interior is covered with mosaics of 41.5 million glass pieces, completed in 1988.

The Missouri Botanical Garden is a botanical garden on Shaw Boulevard in south St. Louis, founded by Henry Shaw and opened in 1859. Its grounds include the Climatron, a geodesic-dome greenhouse from 1960 holding a tropical rainforest, a large Japanese garden with a lake, Victorian gardens and Shaw's 1849 country house; it also keeps a herbarium of over 7.5 million specimens.

The Saint Louis Science Center is a science museum at the south-east corner of Forest Park, which began as the McDonnell Planetarium in 1963. A skybridge over Interstate 64 links the planetarium to the main building, which has more than 700 hands-on exhibits on the earth and life sciences, physics and technology, a dinosaur hall and a five-storey OMNIMAX dome theatre.

Forest Park is a public park of about 526 hectares in western St. Louis, dedicated in 1876, which hosted the 1904 World's Fair and the 1904 Summer Olympics. Its woods, lakes, prairie and the Grand Basin below Art Hill surround the Saint Louis Zoo, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Missouri History Museum, the Science Center and The Muny open-air theatre.

The Saint Louis Zoo is a zoo in Forest Park, established in 1910 after the city bought the walk-through Flight Cage built for the 1904 World's Fair. Its areas hold elephants, great apes, big cats, penguins, sea lions and reptiles among other animals, and the narrow-gauge Emerson Zooline Railroad runs around the grounds.