Colorado

Casa Bonita

Costumed divers throw themselves off a thirty-foot indoor waterfall every few minutes while you eat. It is the last one of these left on Earth.

International Church of Cannabis

A 113-year-old church, painted floor to ceiling by two internationally known street artists, that is the only house of worship of its religion anywhere.

Red Rocks Park and Amphitheatre

Two three-hundred-foot sandstone monoliths that happen to form the best-sounding room in music. Free to walk on any day nobody is playing.

Clyfford Still Museum

One painter's will demanded a city build a museum for his work alone and show nothing else. Denver agreed, and got ninety-five per cent of everything he ever made.

Tiny Town and Railroad

A man started building a village at one-sixth scale for his daughter in 1915. A hundred years later you can ride a train through it.

Dinosaur Ridge

Jurassic footprints exposed at eye level in a roadside ridge — at the site where Stegosaurus was first dug up in 1877.

Coors Brewery

Twenty-two million barrels a year from a single site. It is not the biggest brewing company — it is the biggest brewery anywhere.

Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave

The man who invented how we picture the Old West, buried under tons of rock on a mountaintop — and Wyoming has spent a century insisting he is in the wrong grave.

Buckhorn Exchange

Denver's oldest restaurant, under 575 taxidermy mounts including a two-headed calf — and holding the first liquor licence Colorado ever issued, still on the wall.

The Wild Animal Sanctuary

Walk a mile and a half above six hundred rescued lions, tigers and bears. The world's longest footbridge, over the world's largest carnivore sanctuary.

Lakeside Amusement Park

Ride a carousel that has been turning since 1908, in the last surviving park of its kind in America.

Wynkoop Brewing Company

An unemployed geologist learned to write a business plan at the library, was turned down by 32 lenders, opened this on skid row, and later became a senator. LoDo's revival is dated from the day it opened.

Colorado State Capitol

One step marks exactly a mile above the sea. Inside, the walls are finished in a pink onyx whose entire world supply was used up on this one building.

The Fort Restaurant

A full-scale adobe reconstruction of an 1830s fur-trading fort, serving the bison, elk and quail that were actually traded there.

Sandlot Brewery

Blue Moon was created on these taps in 1995 and sold nowhere else, under the name Bellyslide Belgian White. Open only on game days, to ticket holders.

United States Mint at Denver

Stand on the floor of a working mint and watch blank discs become money that will be in a till within weeks.

Mother Cabrini Shrine

373 steps up a mountainside — the exact number a saint climbed every day to pray in Rome.

Bear Creek Park

A 1970s concrete sombrero slide was too loved to demolish and too awkward to keep. The city solved it by burying a giant cowboy under the playground and leaving his hat on top.

Historic Elitch Theatre

Home of America's first and oldest summer-stock company from 1893, and the first place films were ever screened in the western United States. Grace Kelly and Cecil B. DeMille both worked here.

Cheesman Park

A handsome lawn park with a marble pavilion and roughly two thousand bodies still underneath it. Nothing on site mentions this.

Forney Museum of Transportation

One of eight surviving Big Boys, the largest steam locomotives ever built, and one of very few kept indoors where you can walk its full length.

Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge

The Army made napalm and sarin here until 1982. It is now sixteen thousand acres of shortgrass prairie with more than 250 free-roaming bison, ten miles from downtown.

My Brother's Bar

Denver's oldest bar, where Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg were regulars. A letter Cassady wrote from reform school apologising for the four dollars he still owed hangs by the bathrooms.

National Ballpark Museum

One man spent a lifetime collecting the physical fabric of ballparks — bricks, turnstiles, seats, signage. The prize is a section of Fenway's Green Monster carrying 96 ball dents.

Hammond's Candies

One of the last big American candy factories still working entirely by hand, on machines from the 1800s. The tour is free, runs every half hour, and ends with a candy cane.

Lumonics Light & Sound Gallery

One of America's first and longest-running light-art studios, begun in 1969. The Saturday performance is orchestrated live and never repeated.

Williams & Graham

Pull the right book off the shelf and the bookcase opens. The shop out front is real, properly stocked, and staffed by people who will not tell you.

Molly Brown House Museum

The real house of the woman who survived the Titanic and argued her lifeboat back toward the wreck. She was nothing like the musical.

Denver Doll Hospital

A working repair shop for dolls — restringing, repainting, rebuilding — practising a trade that has very nearly died out.

Denver Museum of Miniatures, Dolls and Toys

An entire museum of small things, including dollhouses furnished down to the plates on the table.

Oakwell Beer Spa

Soak in a wooden tub of warm beer, hops and botanicals, a Central European spa tradition that is still rare in America.

Adams Mystery Playhouse

Interrogate suspects between courses at a murder mystery staged inside an actual former funeral home.

Meow Wolf Convergence Station

Four storeys of walk-through invented world, built by a hundred-odd artists. Every one of these the company builds is entirely different work.

Cache la Poudre River / Poudre Canyon (CO-14)

One river in the whole of Colorado carries federal Wild and Scenic protection, and it runs through town.

Soapstone Prairie Natural Area

A herd carrying Yellowstone bloodlines, with the disease bred out of it in a university lab down the road.

Old Town Square

The Disney art director who drew Main Street U.S.A. grew up here and came back to photograph it.

C.P. Gillette Museum of Arthropod Diversity

Five million pinned specimens, and the ten minutes on public display are the least of it.

Fort Collins Municipal Railway

A 1919 streetcar still working the line it was bought for, down the middle of a residential boulevard.

Lindenmeier Site, Soapstone Prairie Natural Area

The richest Folsom camp ever dug, and above ground there is deliberately nothing at all to see.

Old Town Square

More than 150 donated pianos, painted in public in the square, and all of them still playable.

CSU Annual Flower Trial Garden

A working plant trial where the public gets a scoresheet and a say in what nurseries stock next year.

U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Museum

A museum where the wheelchair route and the walking route are the same route, by design, in the city that runs the American team.

Edward C. Rochette Money Museum

A quarter of a million coins, notes, tokens and medals, in the largest museum in the country devoted entirely to money.

Pikes Peak Summit

A club has climbed Pikes Peak every New Year's Eve since 1922 to fire the midnight display from 14,115 feet.

World Figure Skating Museum & Hall of Fame

The International Skating Union keeps the sport's official world archive here, in a five-dollar museum next to a hotel.

Pikes Peak Summit Visitor Center

A 1916 doughnut recipe tuned to the air pressure at 14,115 feet, and it genuinely does not work anywhere lower.

Paint Mines Interpretive Park

Banded clay hoodoos in red, yellow and purple, quarried for pigment across nine thousand years, and free to walk through.

Will Rogers Shrine of the Sun

A 114-foot granite tower built in 1937 with no wood and no nails, holding the tomb of the man who built half the city's attractions.

Garden of the Gods Park

A family gave the city 480 acres of red sandstone in 1909, on the written condition that nobody ever be charged to walk in it.

Michael Garman Museum & Gallery

One sculptor spent 35 years building a 3,000 square foot city at one-sixth scale, with holograms and mirrors that change it while you look away.

Glen Eyrie

The man who founded Colorado Springs built himself a sixty-room Tudor castle in the foothills, and it still runs tours.

United States Air Force Academy Cadet Chapel

Seventeen aluminium spires over four separate places of worship, closed for restoration until 2028.

ProRodeo Hall of Fame and Museum of the American Cowboy

The official hall of fame of professional rodeo, and reportedly the only museum anywhere devoted to the sport alone.

The Broadmoor Manitou & Pikes Peak Cog Railway

Nine miles of toothed rack rail from a small-town depot to the top of a fourteener, the highest cog railway anywhere.

Manitou Incline

The rails came out in 1990 and left 2,744 sleepers behind, rising 2,000 feet in under a mile.

Manitou Springs Chamber of Commerce & Visitors Bureau

Eight public fountains, each pouring naturally fizzy mineral water with a different taste, and all of them free to drink.

Manitou Springs Penny Arcade

Four hundred-odd machines across eight buildings, still fed with real pennies, the oldest of them from 1905.

Miramont Castle Museum

A French priest built this in 1895 and used nine different architectural styles, seemingly at random, across four storeys.

Manitou Avenue

Five-person teams race decorated coffins down the main street, in memory of a woman whose own coffin slid off the mountain in 1929.

Memorial Park

Every January since 1996, a mountain town rents you a fruitcake so you can throw it as far as you can.