Denver

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dinosaur Ridge

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

Lakeside Amusement Park

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Cheesman Park

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

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.

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.