Arkansas

Arkansas calls itself "The Natural State," and once you've floated down the Buffalo River in a canoe, you'll understand the nickname. A vacation in Arkansas combines forested ridgelines, steaming thermal springs, and the flat cotton plains along the Mississippi with a capital city where American civil rights history was made.

Between the Ozark Plateau and the Mississippi Delta

This state in the southern United States divides roughly into two halves. In the northwest and west rise the Ozarks and the Ouachita Mountains, an old, deeply dissected highland of oak and hickory forests, limestone bluffs, and clear rivers. The southeast, by contrast, belongs to the Delta: pancake-flat alluvial plain, rice fields, soybeans, cypress swamps, and oxbow lakes of the Mississippi, which forms the eastern border. In between, the Arkansas River flows diagonally across the state, linking Fort Smith on the Oklahoma border with Little Rock in the center.

Cities and Towns from Little Rock to Fayetteville

Little Rock is the capital and largest city, together with North Little Rock on the other side of the river. The Clinton Presidential Center stands right on the riverbank, and Little Rock Central High School is a National Historic Site commemorating 1957, when nine Black students, under federal protection, forced the desegregation of the school. In the northwest, a metro area of its own has grown up over the past few decades: Fayetteville, home to the University of Arkansas and its Razorbacks, along with Rogers, Springdale, and Bentonville, where Walmart is headquartered. Fort Smith cherishes its Wild West past as a frontier outpost bordering the former Indian Territory, while Jonesboro and Conway are lively college towns off the tourist trail. In Bentonville itself, the Walmart Museum in Sam Walton's first store is worth a look, and the network of mountain bike trails around the city is now considered one of the best in the US.

Attractions in Arkansas

At the top of the list of Arkansas destinations is Hot Springs. The historic Bathhouse Row, with its bathhouses from the 1910s and 1920s, forms the heart of Hot Springs National Park; in two of the buildings you can still soak in spring water of about 140°F. In the Ozarks, Buffalo National River, in 1972 the first river in the US to be placed under federal protection, draws visitors with canoe trips beneath towering cliffs and hikes such as the one to the overlook at Hawksbill Crag. In Bentonville, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, set in a woodland park, shows works from the colonial era to the present. The Crater of Diamonds State Park near Murfreesboro is quirky and one of a kind: visitors can dig for diamonds themselves and keep what they find. Eureka Springs, a Victorian spa town with winding streets climbing the hillside, feels like a place that time forgot.

History and Culture

The Quapaw, Caddo, and Osage, among others, once lived here before the area passed to the US with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and became a state in 1836. In the Civil War, Arkansas sided with the Confederacy. The Delta region shaped music history: Helena has hosted the King Biscuit Blues Festival for decades, and Johnny Cash grew up in Dyess, where his boyhood home can now be visited in restored form. In the Ozarks, a lively folk music tradition with fiddle and dulcimer has survived, for example at the Ozark Folk Center in Mountain View.

Food and Drink

The cuisine is hearty and Southern. Catfish, fried and served with hush puppies, is as much a part of it as slow-smoked barbecue. Little Rock claims to have invented cheese dip, a warm cheese sauce served with tortilla chips that almost every restaurant here offers. Fried pickles are said to come from Atkins, and in summer roadside stands sell tomatoes from Bradley County and watermelons from Hope. For breakfast, there are biscuits with gravy.

Getting There and Best Time to Visit

International visitors usually fly via Dallas, Atlanta, or Chicago to Little Rock or to Northwest Arkansas National Airport near Bentonville. A rental car is essential; Interstate 40 crosses the state from west to east, but side roads such as Scenic Byway 7 through the Ozarks are more beautiful. The best time to visit is spring, from April to June, when dogwoods bloom and the rivers carry enough water for paddling, as well as October and November, when the Ozark forests turn red and gold. High summer is hot and humid, and tornadoes are occasionally possible in spring.