Places to go in Metro Atlanta.

Atlanta, Marietta, Stone Mountain, the metro core. 18 places worth the drive in this corner of Georgia.

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18 places

Lakes & rivers

Sweetwater Creek State Park

Lithia Springs, GA · Metro Atlanta

Less than a half-mile down the Red Trail, the five-story brick shell of the New Manchester textile mill rises straight out of the woods, its empty window rows looking onto the whitewater shoals of Sweetwater Creek where Union troops burned it in 1864. Past the ruins the path climbs to rocky bluffs above the rapids, and back at the trailhead the 215-acre George Sparks Reservoir keeps kayaks, canoes, and aquacycles moving all summer, fifteen miles from downtown Atlanta.

Mountains

Panola Mountain State Park

Stockbridge, GA · Metro Atlanta

Panola Mountain is the granite outcrop Stone Mountain might have been if it had stayed wild, a 100-acre dome of bare rock so fragile that the only way onto its summit is a ranger-led hike booked ahead of time. In spring, shallow rock pools blaze red with Diamorpha, a tiny succulent that lives nowhere but these weathered granite flats, and the lichen and yellow daisies fill in the rest. Down off the rock, paved and forested trails loop past two small lakes and a nature center, fifteen minutes from Atlanta but a different world entirely.

Attractions

Fox Theatre

Atlanta, GA · Metro Atlanta

This 1929 movie palace on Peachtree Street began as a Shrine temple, which is why its auditorium unfolds like an open-air Arabian courtyard beneath a ceiling of 96 crystal stars and clouds that drift across a painted night sky. Mighty Mo, the original Moller pipe organ with more than 3,600 pipes, still rises from the pit before Broadway tours and concerts. Take the backstage tour to see the Egyptian Ballroom and the Moorish detail up close, then catch a show under those flickering stars.

Attractions

National Center for Civil and Human Rights

Atlanta, GA · Metro Atlanta

Phil Freelon designed this downtown museum so its curved walls fold toward each other like clasped hands, and the experience inside earns that gesture. You can sit at a 1960s lunch-counter simulation with headphones that pipe in the jeers and threats sit-in protesters endured, then walk through galleries holding Martin Luther King Jr.'s handwritten sermons and travel documents. The upper floor widens the lens from the American civil rights movement to human rights struggles still unfolding around the world.

Attractions

World of Coca-Cola

Atlanta, GA · Metro Atlanta

Atlanta's downtown shrine to the world's most famous soft drink walks you from the 1880s soda fountain through the glass-walled vault said to hold the secret formula. The finale is the Taste It room, where you can sample more than 60 Coca-Cola products bottled across the globe, including a few that will make you wince. It sits on Pemberton Place beside Centennial Olympic Park, an easy pairing with the Georgia Aquarium next door.

Attractions

Georgia Aquarium

Atlanta, GA · Metro Atlanta

Behind the glass of the Ocean Voyager gallery, whale sharks and manta rays glide through 6.3 million gallons of saltwater, the largest single tank in the country. The Georgia Aquarium sits downtown across from Centennial Olympic Park, where beluga whales, African penguins, and a clear acrylic tunnel put the open ocean overhead as you walk beneath it.

Attractions

Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park

Atlanta, GA · Metro Atlanta

This stretch of Auburn Avenue holds the places that shaped Dr. King's life and the movement he led: the Queen Anne house where he was born, the Ebenezer Baptist Church sanctuary where he preached, and the reflecting pool where he and Coretta Scott King are entombed beside an eternal flame. The Park Service visitor center traces the civil rights era through the Courage to Lead exhibit, and ranger-led tours of the birth home are free with a same-day reservation. Walk the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame on your way between the sites to read the names cast in bronze along the sidewalk.

Attractions

Atlanta History Center

Atlanta, GA · Metro Atlanta

Thirty-three acres in Buckhead hold a museum, woodland trails, and a clutch of restored homes, anchored by the 1928 Swan House and its cascading fountain staircase. The Cyclorama brings you face-to-face with a 49-foot-tall hand-painted panorama of the Battle of Atlanta, restored to its full circular sweep. Between the gardens, the farmhouse, and galleries tracing the city from the Civil War to the 1996 Olympics, an afternoon here doubles as a walk through Atlanta itself.

Attractions

College Football Hall of Fame

Atlanta, GA · Metro Atlanta

A three-story wall of 768 helmets greets you at the door, one for every program in the college game, and the one from your school lights up when you register at the entrance. The 45-yard indoor field downstairs lets you run routes, kick field goals, and test your forty time before you ever reach the bronze busts of the inducted. It sits across from Centennial Olympic Park in downtown Atlanta, an easy pairing with the aquarium and the Coca-Cola museum next door.

Attractions

Center for Puppetry Arts

Atlanta, GA · Metro Atlanta

Jim Henson and Kermit the Frog cut the ribbon here in 1978, and the building has been the country's largest home for puppetry ever since. The Worlds of Puppetry Museum holds the largest collection of Henson artifacts anywhere, with retired Muppets and pieces from The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth alongside marionettes, rod puppets, and shadow figures from around the globe. Between live shows in the theater and a workshop where you build a puppet to take home, it rewards a slow afternoon.

Attractions

Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum

Atlanta, GA · Metro Atlanta

Set on a rise that once held Sherman headquarters during the Battle of Atlanta, this presidential museum walks you through the Carter years and a post-presidency that won a Nobel Peace Prize. Step into a full-scale replica of the Oval Office as Carter kept it, then read the actual letters and decisions behind Camp David. The surrounding gardens and pond make the grounds a quiet stop in their own right, just off Freedom Park.

Attractions

The Varsity

Atlanta, GA · Metro Atlanta

Open since 1928 on the edge of Georgia Tech, this is the world's largest drive-in restaurant, a two-block stretch of red-and-white where carhops once worked the lot and the counter crew still barks What'll ya have at anyone who pauses too long. Order chili dogs, onion rings, and a Frosted Orange under the neon, then carry the tray up to a tiered TV room to eat the way Atlanta has for nearly a century. It is roadside Americana that never turned into a museum piece, just a loud, greasy, deeply local rite of passage.

Attractions

Georgia State Capitol

Atlanta, GA · Metro Atlanta

The dome that gives Georgia politics its nickname is real gold leaf, hammered from Dahlonega ore mined an hour north where America had its first gold rush in the 1830s. Finished in 1889 and capped by the statue Miss Freedom, the building doubles as a free state museum, with flags, portraits, and a fourth-floor collection of Georgia minerals and Civil War relics open on weekdays. Walk the marble rotunda beneath the gilded dome, then step out onto Capitol Square where the working seat of state government meets a century-old monument.

Attractions

Margaret Mitchell House

Atlanta, GA · Metro Atlanta

In a ground-floor apartment of this 1899 Tudor Revival house, then carved into ten units she wryly called The Dump, Margaret Mitchell typed most of Gone with the Wind between 1925 and 1932. Run by the Atlanta History Center, the restored Crescent Avenue building lets you stand in the cramped flat where the Pulitzer winner took shape and trace how a Jazz Age Atlanta reporter became one of the century's best-selling novelists. The exhibits hold the typewriter, manuscript pages, and the book's afterlife on screen, set against the story of the city that surrounds it.

Attractions

The Big Chicken

Marietta, GA · Metro Atlanta

A 56-foot steel rooster towers over Cobb Parkway with a yellow beak that opens and shuts and eyes that roll, a roadside KFC sign that has marked the spot since 1963. Locals give directions by it and pilots reportedly used it as a visual checkpoint, and when storm damage nearly doomed it in 1993 the public outcry kept it standing. Pull in for a bucket and a photo under one of the South's most beloved pieces of programmatic architecture.

Attractions

High Museum of Art

Atlanta, GA · Metro Atlanta

The Southeast's largest art museum holds more than 20,000 works behind a white facade that is itself a landmark: Richard Meier's gleaming 1983 building, later doubled by Renzo Piano's 2005 wing of skylit galleries. Inside you move through American painting, African art, folk and self-taught work, and a deep photography collection, with the light from above shifting as you climb the spiraling ramps. It anchors the Woodruff Arts Center on Midtown's Peachtree Street, an easy pairing with a symphony night or a walk through the surrounding arts district.

Attractions

The Wren's Nest

Atlanta, GA · Metro Atlanta

In this Queen Anne Victorian in Atlanta's West End, journalist Joel Chandler Harris wrote the Uncle Remus tales that carried Br'er Rabbit and the briar patch into American folklore, adapted from the African American oral tradition he heard as a young man. The house is kept much as the Harris family left it, down to the porch where a wren once nested in the mailbox and gave the place its name. Time a visit for one of the live storytelling sessions, when those trickster tales are told aloud the way they were meant to be heard.

Attractions

Stone Mountain Carving

Stone Mountain, GA · Metro Atlanta

Cut 42 feet deep into the north face of a granite dome, this is the largest high-relief carving in the world, spanning 190 feet of stone with Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson on horseback. Begun in 1923 and not finished until sculptor Roy Faulkner topped it off in 1972, the three-acre relief reads as a monument to the Lost Cause and the Klan revival that bankrolled its early years. You can take the cable car to the 1,683-foot summit for the long view, or stand in the lawn below as the nightly laser show plays across the figures.