Richmond is the capital of Virginia, a mid-sized southern city of about 225,000 people wrapped around the James River roughly halfway between Washington, D.C. and the coast. It was a 17th-century trading post at the Falls of the James, an 18th-century revolutionary capital (Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty or give me death" speech was given here in 1775), and for four grim years the capital of the Confederacy, which makes a surprisingly large amount of American history local: the restored Capitol designed by Thomas Jefferson, the Museum of the Confederacy and the White House of the Confederacy, and the row of statues along Monument Avenue that were the subject of a protracted national argument until most of them were removed in 2020.
Today's Richmond is very much a different city. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is one of the best regional art museums in the United States, free to enter and with extraordinary holdings of Fabergé, Art Nouveau, and South Asian art. Maymont, a 100-acre Gilded Age estate on the edge of downtown, has Japanese and Italian gardens, a children's farm and wild-animal enclosures. The James River is the other obvious draw — Richmond is one of the few American cities with serious whitewater rapids inside its city limits, and the wooded islands, trails and swimming holes of the James River Park System run right through the middle of town.
Then there is the food scene, which has quietly become one of the best in the south. The area around Carytown and the Fan — a pretty grid of late-19th-century townhouses, Richmond's architectural signature — is full of restaurants, independent bookshops and coffee places. Shockoe Slip and Shockoe Bottom, the restored tobacco-warehouse districts near the river, cover the nightlife end of the spectrum. And in Scott's Addition, a former warehouse area, a dozen craft breweries, cideries and distilleries have opened in the last decade and are genuinely good.