The 12 best things to do in Salt Lake City

The Capitol stands on the hill directly north of downtown and it is open to the public seven days a week, with free guided tours running on the hour from 10:00 to 3:00, Monday to Friday, and self guided visits any time the building is open. For a state capitol that is unusually generous access, and hardly anybody who visits Salt Lake City for a weekend goes in.

The reason to take the guided version rather than wander is underneath your feet. Between 2004 and 2008 the building went through a renovation costing around 273 million dollars, the centerpiece of which was fitting 265 base isolators beneath it. Each one can travel 24 inches horizontally in any direction, giving a total swing of 48 inches, so in a major earthquake the ground moves and the building substantially does not.

The Capitol was isolated between 2004 and 2008 with 265 bearings. The temple down the hill was isolated during the renovation that began at the end of 2019, on 98 much larger units set twenty feet underground. Standing on the Capitol steps you can see both, which makes this the only place in the United States where you can look at two separately base isolated landmark buildings at once. It is a genuinely strange thing to be able to say about a city.

The Capitol occupies the highest ground immediately above downtown, and the terrace in front of it frames the whole grid running south with the Oquirrh Mountains closing the far side. It is the standard photograph of this city for good reason. It is also free, open into the evening, and about a fifteen minute walk up from the north end of the shopping district if you are willing to take the hill.

The Rio Tinto Center opened on 18 November 2011 on the university's foothill, and the building is as much of the visit as the collection. It runs to 163,000 square feet, it is LEED Gold, and it is wrapped in 42,000 square feet of standing seam copper mined at the Bingham Canyon mine across the valley and laid in horizontal bands to read as sedimentary rock. A museum about Utah, clad in Utah, on the side of the mountain Utah is built against.

The collection behind it holds more than 1.2 million objects representing all 29 of the state's counties, and the museum makes that visible rather than storing it out of sight. The Canyon, the building's central circulation space, carries a three story glass Collections Wall showing more than 500 objects from the research collections. Most museums hide the archive. This one puts it in the atrium.

The Rio Tinto Center is set into the hillside and the route is designed to be walked from the top gallery downward, which means the sensible move is to ride or climb to the upper level at the start rather than fighting the gradient at the end with tired children. The terraces on the valley side are the best free viewpoint you get once you are inside, and on a clear day they are worth as much as any gallery.

This is the default move on a storm day or a red air day for a large part of the valley, so a January Saturday is the busiest it ever gets. A weekday morning is a different museum entirely. If you are visiting in summer, the same logic runs the other way: the outdoor attractions are at their best and the museum is at its quietest.

Red Butte Garden covers over a hundred acres at 300 Wakara Way, and the number that actually matters is 21, because that is how much of it is developed display garden. The rest is natural area carrying over five miles of hiking trails, which means an hour here is either a stroll between borders or a genuine climb into native oak and maple depending on which gate you walk out of. The collection runs to more than 3,000 species and roughly 590,000 spring bulbs.

The State Arboretum of Utah designation dates from 1961, on plant evaluation work that began in 1930, and the garden itself opened to the public in 1985. In summer the amphitheater carries an outdoor concert series that has been running since 1987. The Red Butte page covers the garden, the concert ticketing and the closed research canyon directly behind it.

Anybody who has just taken on a Utah garden should treat one section here as homework rather than sightseeing. The water conservation planting shows whole schemes that hold up through a dry summer, arranged as finished beds instead of as labeled specimens, which is the difference between leaving inspired and leaving able to buy the right six plants. Half an hour in it is worth more than any amount of advice at a counter.

Far more people hold memberships here than there are seats on the lawn, and members are served first in staggered waves. Work that arithmetic through and you arrive at the practical rule: for any show with a name attached to it, a public onsale is close to decorative. Anybody who really wants a particular night joins the garden first and buys second, which is also how the garden funds the rest of its year.

Eighty acres in the middle of the south side, bought by the city from Brigham Young's estate in 1881 for 27,500 dollars and dedicated as a park on 17 June 1882. Before that it was Isaac Chase's farm, and both the mill he built between 1848 and 1852 and the house he finished in 1854 are still standing in the middle of it, which makes them among the oldest buildings in the city you can walk straight up to.

Tracy Aviary occupies about eight acres of the southwest corner and has been open since 2 July 1938, which makes it the oldest and largest of only two free standing aviaries in the country. The Chase Home holds the Utah State Folk Arts Collection and is free. The Liberty Park page has the farm, the fountain and the elephant that moved a zoo.

For years there was running water here, laid out as a walkable map of the seven canyons behind the city, and it was where a generation of children spent July. The water was turned off in 2017. What matters for a visit today is only the ending: rather than fence the thing off permanently, the city rebuilt it without water and reopened it in October 2025 as the Seven Canyon Refuge. The stonework and the canyon shapes are intact and you can still walk them. Guides that call it closed are simply behind.

The park itself costs nothing and it carries the greenhouses, the pond, the playgrounds, the tennis courts and a loop road that fills with walkers every evening. The aviary is modestly priced and the folk art museum in the Chase Home is free. Between the three, this is the cheapest genuinely good day out inside the city, and it works as an hour or as a whole afternoon without any planning at all.

The main branch of the Salt Lake City Public Library opened in February 2003 at Library Square, designed by Moshe Safdie with VCBO Architecture, and it is a genuine piece of architecture rather than a civic building with a nice foyer. It runs to roughly 240,000 square feet, it holds more than 500,000 books and other materials, and in 2006 the whole system was named Library of the Year by Library Journal.

What people come for is the wall. A six story curving wall arcs around the building and you can walk up the outside of it, which turns a library into a route rather than a room, with a rooftop terrace at the top of it looking over the valley. There is a 300 seat auditorium, a row of small shops at ground level, and a plaza that programs markets and events. It is free, it is open to anybody, and it is one of the few buildings in the city that visitors and residents use identically.

On a hot July afternoon or a gray January one, the library does what a museum does without a ticket. Take the wall up, come down through the floors, stop on the rooftop terrace, and you have spent an hour in a serious building for nothing. For anybody traveling with children it also solves the problem of a downtown that otherwise assumes you are shopping or eating.

Library Square programs markets, performances and civic events through the warm months, which is either the reason to go or the reason to go on a different day depending on what you want. The building itself absorbs a busy plaza well, but parking around the square does not, so on an event day walk in or take the train rather than circling.

Gilgal Sculpture Garden is half an acre at 749 East 500 South, tucked behind houses in a way that means most people who live within a mile of it have never been in. Thomas Battersby Child Jr., a Salt Lake City masonry contractor, began building it in 1945 at the age of 57 and worked on it until 1963. It holds 12 original sculptures and more than 70 stones engraved with scripture, poetry and literary texts.

It is described as the only identified visionary art environment in Utah, which is a category rather than a compliment: a place one person built to a private vision, over decades, without a client. Friends of Gilgal Garden bought it in 2000 and it became a Salt Lake City park, so it is now free, open to the public seven days a week, and permanently protected.

This is not a sculpture park in the ordinary sense and it will not read like one. It is one man's argument in stone, arranged in a garden behind a residential street, and the pieces run from the monumental to the small and puzzling. Twenty minutes here is more memorable than an hour in most galleries, precisely because nobody was designing it to be liked.

The entrance is off 500 South and it is easy to walk past, which is a large part of why the place stays quiet. There is no admission desk and no ticket. Go in daylight, take the path slowly, and read the engraved stones rather than only looking at the sculptures, because a good deal of the point of the place is in the text rather than the carving.

The zoo occupies 42 acres at the mouth of Emigration Canyon on the city's eastern edge, cares for more than 150 species, and is accredited by both the American and world zoo accrediting groups. It climbs the foothill, which is worth knowing before you arrive: the site has a real gradient and comfortable shoes matter here more than at any other venue in the valley.

It has only been on that ground since 1931, and the reason it moved is the best story in this city's institutional history. The Utah Zoological Society started in 1911 on a small plot inside Liberty Park. An elephant called Princess Alice, bought from a traveling circus in 1916, developed a habit of escaping and wandering along 7th East, on at least one occasion coming back wearing laundry taken from neighborhood clotheslines. The Hogle family donated 42 acres at the canyon mouth, the main building was dedicated on 31 July 1931, and 14,000 people came through the following day.

The free days belong to the university art museum, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, where the pattern that has run is the first Wednesday and the third Saturday of the month. The zoo does not run free days. It offers discounted Wild Wednesdays in the winter months. Confirm the current schedule with each venue before you build a day around it.

This Is The Place Heritage Park sits directly opposite at the same canyon mouth, which makes the two of them the obvious pairing and saves an entire drive. The zoo is the morning and the heritage village is the afternoon, or the other way round in high summer when the shade matters more. Both are on the same road out of the city and both share the same parking problem on a sunny Saturday.

Four hundred and fifty acres at the mouth of Emigration Canyon, on the ground where the 1847 companies came out of the mountains and looked at the basin for the first time. The heritage village holds over 50 historic structures relocated here from around the state, and from June through August costumed interpreters work them as a living history site, with crafts, trades, a blacksmith forge, pony rides and a train loop.

The monument is the other half and it is a serious piece of sculpture rather than a plaque. Mahonri Young, a grandson of Brigham Young, worked on it from 1939 to 1947, and it was dedicated on 24 July 1947, a hundred years to the day. The granite monument stands sixty feet high and eighty six feet long, flanked by bronze figures and bas reliefs. Young also made the much smaller Seagull Monument on Temple Square in 1913, which means one sculptor made both of this city's defining outdoor monuments thirty four years apart.

In the green months the village is fully staffed and the site is at its strongest, and three to four hours goes quickly. Outside that window the village quiets down considerably and access is reduced at correspondingly reduced prices, which is fine if you came for the monument and the grounds and disappointing if you came expecting the full living history operation. Check the calendar before a winter visit rather than after one.

It sits on an exposed east facing slope at the canyon mouth with limited shade across much of the village, and a July afternoon here is genuinely hot work. Hats, water and the train loop are the middle of the day plan. The first two hours after opening are the comfortable ones, and they are also when the interpreters have the most time to talk to you.

Directly south of Temple Square, City Creek Center runs across two downtown blocks under the first fully retractable glass roof built over a shopping center in the United States. It is more than five hundred feet long, it opens or closes in about six minutes, and it is carried on thirty six steel ribs shaped like whalebones. Roughly twelve hundred feet of recreated creek runs the length of the property with two eighteen foot waterfalls, tracing the historic course of the water the city was surveyed around.

Two blocks further south the street stops being new. The Eagle Emporium at 102 South Main was built in 1864 and is the oldest existing commercial building downtown, with a clock outside erected in 1873 that was originally driven by a water wheel. The Main Street page takes the whole spine, including the weather beacon on the Walker Center and the argument about whether the street should carry cars at all.

The Walker Center at 175 South Main opened in 1912 at eighteen floors, briefly the tallest building between Chicago and San Francisco, and the tower on top has been a weather beacon since the 1950s. Steady blue means clear, flashing blue means cloudy, steady red means rain and flashing red means snow. It came down in the 1980s and was restored in 2008, and it is the single most charming piece of civic infrastructure in the city.

The 1847 plat gave these streets 132 feet of width, partly to carry irrigation down both sides and partly so that a full team of oxen could turn without unhitching. What that leaves is a downtown where a three block walk is a real walk. Light rail runs down the middle of Main with two stations on the street itself, and the downtown free fare zone means a hop between them costs nothing if you board and exit inside the boundary.

South and west of downtown sits the part of the city the railways built and road freight abandoned. The Granary District takes its name literally, from flour mills and grain elevators once among the oldest in the Intermountain West, and it survived the twentieth century largely because nobody wanted the land enough to clear it. What fills those warehouses now is breweries, roasters, studios and workshops behind original brick and steel.

The clearest illustration is a brewery name from 1884 back in business since 2017 as an employee owned operation. The other thing to see is the Fleet Block, a former city fleet yard whose final open space design, a 2.4 acre park with an amphitheater and around 150 new trees, was unveiled in August 2026. The Granary page has both, with dates.

There is exactly one comfortable way to move around in here on foot, and it is the paved 9 Line running along 900 South. Everywhere else you are dealing with 660 foot blocks, missing sidewalk and trucks with a job to do. So choose your two or three stops first, then string them together along that path. Treating the Granary as somewhere to drift is how people end up walking half a mile beside a fence.

Anything you have read about this quarter ages quickly, and that includes this entry. Businesses arrive, move a block and vanish inside a single construction season. Call or look online to confirm that a particular door is still open before you drive down for it, because the alternative is standing in front of a hoarding wondering whether you got the address wrong.

The city has two standard sunset walks and they suit different evenings. Ensign Peak is the short one: about a mile round trip with roughly 374 feet of gain to a 5,417 foot summit, from a trailhead at 1002 North Ensign Vista Drive at the very top of the Avenues. A small group climbed it on 26 July 1847, two days after arriving, to look at the basin they had committed to, and the monument at the top dates from 1934.

The Living Room is the longer one: about 2.4 miles round trip with nine hundred and fifty to a thousand feet of gain, from a trailhead off Colorow Road in Research Park, ending at a set of chairs and couches built out of flat sandstone slabs by hikers over the years. Both are free, both are shadeless, and both are covered in more detail on the Avenues page and the Red Butte page.

This ground is an ancient lakebed shoreline, and lakes do not grow trees on their beaches. What that means in practice is that a July afternoon on either trail is genuinely unpleasant and a September evening is close to perfect. Take water on both regardless of the month, and treat the last two hours of daylight as the window rather than the middle of the day.

Dogs must be leashed at all times across the city's foothill natural area rather than trail by trail, because the ground carries nesting birds and wintering mule deer and the contours are narrow enough that an off leash dog meeting a descending cyclist is a real collision. Fireworks are illegal in every Salt Lake City park and natural area regardless of the date, and rangers patrol the foothill daily. The hill is bone dry from June and it sits directly above houses.