Austin

Austin Travel Guide

There's a mystique about Austin. Even if you've lived for years in this small town turned big city, the reasons why the city functions as it does, and why it seems so different from other U.S. cities, may not be readily apparent.

Austin is an extraordinarily open and welcoming place -- a city where you're not only allowed but expected to be yourself, in all your quirky glory. The people you encounter are likely to be laissez-faire and may even be newcomers themselves (Austin's population grew 47% during the 1990s, and continues to expand at a healthy pace: 65,800 new residents were added to the Austin-Round Rock metropolitan area from July 2006 to July 2007, according to the U.S. Census Bureau).

It's not pushing it too much to liken Austin to San Francisco: in the middle of a big state and the golden destination where people who are just a bit different and quite self-directed come to realize their fullest selves. Many who would never consider living anywhere else in Texas have relocated here after dreaming the Austin dream. The city ranks high on many national best-places-to-live lists. If it's sometimes hard for Austin to live up to its hype (some of it is self-generated), it's still a place where creativity and maverick thinking are valued.

Such things weren't on the mind of Mirabeau B. Lamar, president-elect of the Texas Republic, when he set out to hunt buffalo in 1838 but returned home with a much greater catch: a home for the new state capital. He fell in love with a tiny settlement called Waterloo, surrounded by rolling hills and fed by cool springs. Within a year the government had arrived, and the town, renamed Austin (after Stephen F. Austin, the "Father of Texas"), was on its way to becoming a city. About a half a century later, in 1883, the University of Texas at Austin was founded.

Fed by the 1970s salad days of the "outlaw country" movement popularized by Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and others, through the growing viewership of Austin City Limits, a showcase for bands that began taping for a local PBS station in 1976, Austin's reputation as a music center has grown to the point that the city now bills itself as the Live Music Capital of the World. This is especially true every March, when the city hosts the South by Southwest Conferences and Festivals (widely known as SXSW), which draws people from throughout the world: bands, record-company executives, filmmakers, Internet celebrities, and, of course, legions of fans.

Today Austin is in the midst of reinventing itself yet again. High-tech industries have migrated to the area, making it Texas's answer to Silicon Valley. The city has also become an important filmmaking center. For the moment, Austin retains a few vestiges of a small-town atmosphere -- but a quick scan of its fast-growing downtown skyline will tell you that its days as a sleepy college town are long gone.

Despite all the changes that have occurred (and are occurring) in this capital city, Austin is still a town whose roots are planted firmly in the past -- a past the city is proud to preserve and show off to visitors.