Best Things to Do In Austin, Texas
- The Anonymous Hungry Hippopotamus
- Jul 8
- 6 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
Austin's official slogan is "Live Music Capital of the World," though its unofficial and more commonly known slogan is "Keep Austin Weird." Both are true but incomplete. What I found underneath them was a city working out its own history in public, in murals that get erased and fought back into existence, in a bar built specifically because segregation demanded somewhere else to go, and in millions of bats that show up most nights, though not the night I actually asked them to. Here is a list of the best things I found to do in Austin:
Street Art
Austin is home to over 80 public murals, mostly clustered in artsy, walkable hubs.
SOCO Legendary Memories Vintage Letters
South Congress, or SoCo, is where Austin's mural obsession is most concentrated. It is dense enough that an entire afternoon can disappear into nothing but wall-hunting.
Rhapsody
Rhapsody, a mosaic-tile piece by UT art professor John Yancey, commemorates East Austin's blues and jazz roots and sits just steps from the Historic Victory Grill, covered later in this guide.
Greetings From Austin
A few blocks over, Greetings From Austin, painted by Todd Sanders and Rory Skagen in the style of a vintage postcard, has become one of the most photographed walls in the city.
You Got To Have Soul
Nearby, a young Aretha Franklin, rendered in the mural You Got to Have Soul, watches over the Continental Club as if she's still headlining it.
Let's Band Together
Let's Band Together, by Federico Archuleta, folds a Sacred Heart into a cluster of musical instruments, ...
"Won't You Be My Neighbor?"
... and a giant stenciled Mr. Rogers, the work of artist Niz, welcomes the whole city under the title Won't You Be My Neighbor.
We Rise
The most interesting wall on the walk has the least straightforward history. In 2014, Chris Rogers painted We Rise here, celebrating Black excellence against the backdrop of East Austin's own history. In 2017, a new tenant painted over it entirely in stark white, erasing it from a neighborhood whose Black population had already been shrinking under the pressure of gentrification.
The backlash was immediate and loud enough that the tenant agreed to let Rogers repaint. A local nonprofit sought community input this time, and Rogers repainted it, expanding the piece to include Latino faces alongside Black ones. The mural standing there now isn't the one that got erased. It's the one the neighborhood fought to get back, on its own terms.
Just beside it, a second mural by artist Joe Diril depicts fellow Austinites Alejandro Escovedo, Gary Clark Jr., Matthew McConaughey, and Taméca Jones, a kind of unofficial local hall of fame painted directly onto the block.
You're My Butter Half
You're My Butter Half, by John Rockwell, draws a steady line of couples and best friends waiting for their turn in front of it, ...
You're the Yee to my Haw
... and You're the Yee to My Haw, commissioned by jewelry designer Kendra Scott from Austin muralist Tara Johnston for her flagship store, is exactly as playful as its name suggests.
History and Culture
Austin’s history begins with 11,000-year-old indigenous settlements and continues to its 1839 founding as the capital of the Republic of Texas (originally named Waterloo). It was later renamed for Stephen F. Austin.
Texas State Cemetery
The Texas State Cemetery accepts burials only from people who've met a specific bar: state office, or a significant contribution to the state.
Running straight through it is what's reportedly the shortest highway in the country, a stretch of road measuring exactly 0.51 miles.
The University of Texas at Austin
A drive-by of the University of Texas at Austin came next (hook 'em horns).
The Texas State Capitol
This was followed by the Texas State Capitol, worth actually walking into rather than just photographing from the lawn.
The rotunda and ceiling alone justify it.
Everything in this state gets described as big, and in this case, the cliché holds up literally: each hand-crafted door hinge in the building weighs over seven pounds..
Historic Victory Grill
The Historic Victory Grill was founded in 1945 by Johnny Holmes for a specific, ugly reason: Black soldiers were coming home from defending the United States in World War II to a Texas that still wouldn't serve them at most of its bars and restaurants. Holmes built them a place where that wasn't true.
Ike and Tina Turner played here. So did James Brown, Etta James, Billie Holiday, Chuck Berry, and Janis Joplin. Eighty years later, it's still standing, still a bar, and still worth a drink in a city that likes to call itself weird but rarely reckons this directly with why a place like this needed to exist in the first place.
The Driskill
Another great stop for a drink is The Driskill, the oldest hotel in Austin with a very different historical significance than The Historic Victory Grill. This is the site where LBJ had his first date with Lady Bird Johnson, one day after meeting her. Later that day, he proposed to her. She turned him down. He didn't take the hint. Ten weeks later, they were married, which tracks with everything else I learned about how fast this state seems to move once it's made up its mind.
Nature and Water
Austin's relationship with the outdoors runs on water as much as anything else, a city built around a river, a series of spring-fed swimming holes, and a bat colony that draws its own crowds around a lake at dusk. I spent a good chunk of the trip working through as much of it as I could fit in.
Mount Bonnell
Mount Bonnell is 102 stone steps up from the parking lot, ...
... and the payoff at the top is a clean view of the Colorado River (also called Lake Austin in Texas), and the city skyline beyond it.
Pennybacker Bridge
From Mount Bonnell, I followed the river to the Pennybacker Bridge, the second bridge in the world built with a cable support system.
It is one of the more photogenic crossings I've driven in Texas.
McKinney Falls
One morning included a hike to McKinney Falls, in weather that had "cooled down" to 92 degrees or so the meteorologist said on the morning's local news.
I made it to both the upper and lower falls, which felt like a reasonable place to stop.
92 degrees is not, in fact, cool, whatever the forecast wants to call it.
Barton Springs Pool
Barton Springs Pool is a three-acre pool with an average year-round temperature of 68 degrees, cool enough to justify working off Texas barbecue with a swim.
Barton Springs Pool is fed by a natural, underground, spring and has several diving boards. I was fortunate to visit when it wasn't too crowded so I had plenty of time and space to enjoy the refreshing water.
Lady Bird Lake Bat Flight
The strangest outing of the whole trip came at dusk, when I boarded a boat to watch bats, a sentence I did not expect to write, ever.
Austin is home to one of the largest bat colonies in North America: 1.5 to 2 million Mexican free-tailed bats living under the South Congress Bridge from March through September, taking flight most evenings to eat somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 pounds of insects a night, mosquitoes included. (You'd think that would clear out Austin's mosquito problem entirely. It does not.)
The bats didn't fly that night, despite a full audience lining the bridge and the water.
Still, the sunset over Lady Bird Lake alone was not a bad consolation prize.
And as darkness fell, the Austin skyline lit up, glowing against the water.
Music
Austin has called itself the Live Music Capital of the World since 1991, and walking a few blocks on any given night makes the case for it. There is blues on one corner, honky-tonk on the next, and jazz somewhere in between.
Elephant Room
The Elephant Room, tucked into the Swift Building, came recommended for jazz. Its name has an odd origin, unrelated to the music entirely. When developers dug out the building's parking garage, they hit what's now recognized as the largest mastodon bone discovery west of the Mississippi.
Great music, great company, and a room named for a fossil. That makes for a memorable night.
Antone's
To close out the trip and the night, I walked across the street to the famous Antone's for a set of live music, more good conversation, and one last nightcap before bed.
Murals that got erased and fought their way back. A bar built because Texas gave Black veterans nowhere else to go. Two million bats that didn't show up, and a sunset that made the wait worth it anyway. Austin's slogan promised weird. What it actually delivered was a city more honest about its own history than I expected, or its reputation gives it credit for.
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