Hotels in Austin

Austin calls itself the Live Music Capital of the World and has the venue count to back it up, with hundreds of stages from the honky-tonks and blues bars of Sixth Street to the more considered rooms on Red River and South Congress. SXSW in March and Austin City Limits in October turn the whole city into a festival.

The other Austin obsession is barbecue, and the queue outside Franklin Barbecue is a genuine tourist attraction in itself. Beyond brisket, the city has become one of the more interesting food towns in the US, particularly for breakfast tacos. South Congress is the shopping and people-watching strip, East Austin the creative quarter.

For a Texas city, Austin is unusually outdoors-oriented. Barton Springs Pool holds spring-fed water at a constant 20°C, Lady Bird Lake has a 16 km hike-and-bike trail through the centre, and at dusk from March to October some 1.5 million Mexican free-tailed bats stream out from under Congress Avenue Bridge, the largest urban bat colony in North America.