Downtown Napa was, for most of the twentieth century, a quiet county seat eclipsed by the valley's grander wine towns. Sustained redevelopment over the past two decades has turned it into a destination in its own right, with a riverfront promenade, more than two dozen downtown tasting rooms, a substantial restaurant scene and a refurbished Victorian core.
The Napa Riverfront walk loops a kilometre or so along both sides of the river between the Oxbow Public Market and the central First Street block. The Goodman Library, the Napa County Courthouse Plaza, and the restored Napa Opera House give the centre a coherent nineteenth-century streetscape that survived earthquakes and the wine valley's late-twentieth-century transformations.