The plan at a glance

The Olympic park block, then Midtown and Piedmont Park, then Auburn Avenue and the BeltLine

Atlanta is a city of about half a million with a metropolitan area of more than six million, sitting on the Piedmont at 320 metres, which is high for the South and is why it is greener and slightly cooler than the coastal cities. It began in 1837 as the end of a railway line, was burned by Sherman in 1864, and rebuilt fast enough that its symbol is a phoenix. In the twentieth century it became the headquarters of Coca-Cola, Delta and CNN, the busiest passenger airport in the world, and, more importantly, the organising centre of the civil rights movement: Martin Luther King Jr. was born, ordained and buried within two blocks of Auburn Avenue, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference worked from the same street. The 1996 Olympic Games left a park that the tourist quarter has since arranged itself around, and the BeltLine is now rebuilding the inner neighbourhoods along a ring of disused railway.

Day 1The Olympic park block: a whale shark, a secret formula and a lunch counterGeorgia Aquarium · World of Coca-Cola · Centennial Olympic Park · National Center for Civil and Human Rights · College Football Hall of Fame5 sights · Transport between sights Day 2Midtown: Meier and Piano, a Moorish cinema, the park and the glasshouseHigh Museum of Art · Fox Theatre · Piedmont Park · Atlanta Botanical Garden4 sights · Transport between sights Day 3Auburn Avenue, the cemetery and the BeltLineMartin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park · Sweet Auburn · Oakland Cemetery · Krog Street Tunnel · Ponce City Market5 sights · Transport between sights

At a glance

Ways to use these days

If it rains: 6 of the stops are indoors — Georgia Aquarium · World of Coca-Cola · National Center for Civil and Human Rights
Outdoors: Centennial Olympic Park · Piedmont Park · Atlanta Botanical Garden
Lightest day on foot: Day 1 — 1.4 km between stops
Most walking: Day 3 — 5.0 km

Day 1

The Olympic park block: a whale shark, a secret formula and a lunch counter

Four of Atlanta's biggest attractions stand on the edges of one park, which makes for an efficient first day and a very full one: the largest aquarium in the western hemisphere, the Coca-Cola company's account of itself, the helmet wall, and the museum that will stay with you longest.

5 sights
Transport between sights

Stops in order, straight-line distancesWalking route in Google Maps ↗

Morning

1Aquarium

Georgia Aquarium

Bernie Marcus, who founded Home Depot, gave Atlanta $250 million for this in 2005 and it opened as the largest aquarium in the world, a title it has since traded away but not by much. The Ocean Voyager gallery is the reason to come: a 24-million-litre tank holding whale sharks, the largest fish alive, along with manta rays and hundreds of other species, viewed through a 4,500-square-foot acrylic window and from inside a 30-metre tunnel that you cross on a moving walkway. Beyond it are beluga whales, African penguins, a dolphin presentation, a sea otter habitat and a shark gallery. It is expensive and it is very busy, and the whale sharks are worth both.

Plan about 3 h
Open daily with hours that vary by season, generally 09:00 or 10:00 to 17:00 or later; buy a timed ticket online, because the walk-up queue is long and the price is higher; the first slot of the morning is much quieter than any other

150 m east across the plaza, two minutes on foot

2Museum

World of Coca-Cola

A pharmacist named John Pemberton mixed the first batch in Atlanta in 1886 and sold about nine glasses a day; the company that grew out of it is now one of the most widely distributed products on earth, and this building is its own account of itself. It is a corporate museum and makes no pretence otherwise, but it is a well-made one: a vault containing the written formula behind three sets of doors, a bottling line running in miniature, a hundred years of advertising art, a 4-D film, and a room of Coca-Cola's more unusual commissions including Norman Rockwell and Haddon Sundblom's Father Christmas. The tasting room at the end pours about a hundred different drinks the company sells around the world, which is where everyone spends longer than they meant to.

Plan about 2 h
Hours run roughly 10:00 to 19:00 and later at weekends, and online ticket sales close an hour before the doors do; it stands on the same block as the aquarium and the civil rights centre, and combination tickets are sold

Midday

LunchThe attractions have cafés and they are all forgettable. Five minutes' walk gets you to better: the food hall in Ponce City Market is too far for lunch, but downtown has Sweet Auburn Curb Market a short streetcar ride east, where Atlanta's own tradition is on the counters. Southern food here means fried chicken, collard greens cooked with smoked meat, macaroni cheese served as a vegetable, cornbread and sweet tea, and the correct order is a meat and three.

Afternoon

The park is the block these buildings face, one minute

3Park

Centennial Olympic Park

Nine hectares of derelict downtown were cleared for the 1996 Olympic Games and kept afterwards as the legacy park, and the whole tourist quarter of Atlanta has assembled itself around the edges since. At the centre is the Fountain of Rings, five interlocking circles of water jets set flush into the paving that children run through all summer and that perform to music several times a day. Bricks bought by donors during the Games pave much of it, each with a name on it. On 27 July 1996 a pipe bomb was detonated here during a concert, killing two people and injuring more than a hundred; a memorial quadrant marks it. It is the green centre of a district that is otherwise all ticketed attractions.

Plan about 45 min
Free and open daily from 07:00 to 23:00; the Fountain of Rings shows run several times a day in warm months and children are expected to get wet; the aquarium, the Coca-Cola museum and the civil rights centre are all on its edge

100 m north between the aquarium and the Coca-Cola museum, two minutes on foot

4Museum

National Center for Civil and Human Rights

Opened in 2014 on the Olympic park, and the most affecting museum in the city. The ground floor covers the American civil rights movement in a sequence that culminates in a lunch-counter simulation: you sit on a stool, put on headphones, place your hands on the counter, and for ninety seconds a mob screams into your ears while the seat shakes. Almost nobody lasts the full ninety seconds, which is the point. Upstairs, a gallery holds a rotating selection of Martin Luther King Jr.'s personal papers, on loan from Morehouse College, and a third floor connects the American story to contemporary human rights struggles worldwide. It takes two hours and it is not an easy visit.

Plan about 2 h
Open Tuesday to Saturday 10:00 to 17:00 and Sunday 12:00 to 17:00, closed Monday and on Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day, with last entry at 16:00; the lunch-counter exhibit has a warning on it and it is a fair one

Evening

300 m south-west across the park, four minutes on foot

5Museum

College Football Hall of Fame

College football in the American South is not a sport so much as a civic religion, and this building exists to explain that to people who did not grow up in it. The three-storey Helmet Wall inside the entrance carries 768 helmets, one for every programme in the country, and it lights up your chosen team when you scan your ticket. Beyond it are the Hall of Fame gallery of inductees, a replica locker room, a broadcast booth where you can call a play, and an indoor field where you can kick and throw. It is interactive to a degree that some visitors find exhausting and others find is the whole point, and it makes far more sense of Saturday in the South than any explanation would.

Plan about 1 h 30 min
Open 10:00 to 17:00 with the last ticket at 16:30, though hours change and spaces close for private events, so check the schedule; it sits on the north-west corner of Centennial Olympic Park

Morning

1Art museum

High Museum of Art

The leading art museum in the American South, and two buildings worth seeing in their own right: Richard Meier's white porcelain-panelled original of 1983, built around a four-storey atrium with a spiral ramp, and Renzo Piano's three-pavilion expansion of 2005 that more than doubled it and roofed the galleries in a thousand light scoops turned north. The collection is strongest where the South is strongest: nineteenth and twentieth-century American painting, a serious folk and self-taught art collection including Howard Finster and Bill Traylor, African art, photography, and decorative arts. European holdings run from the Italian Renaissance to Impressionism. The museum's partnership with the Louvre brought some remarkable loans through in the 2000s.

Plan about 2 h
Open Tuesday to Saturday 10:00 to 17:00 and Sunday noon to 17:00, closed Monday, with the last ticket issued an hour before closing; it is part of the Woodruff Arts Center and the Arts Center MARTA station is across the street

1.5 km south down Peachtree Street, about 20 minutes on foot or one MARTA stop to North Avenue

2Theatre

Fox Theatre

Begun in 1928 as a Shriners temple, finished as a cinema when the fraternity ran out of money, and decorated in a Moorish and Egyptian fantasy that has to be seen rather than described: a 4,600-seat auditorium designed as a walled Arabian courtyard, with striped canopies, minarets, a trompe-l'oeil sky ceiling of 96 twinkling stars and a projected cloud machine that still works. It nearly became a car park in 1974 and was saved by a public campaign that Atlanta still tells itself about. The Mighty Mo, a 3,622-pipe Möller organ, is the largest theatre organ in a cinema anywhere and rises out of the pit before screenings. The Coca-Cola Summer Film Series is the cheapest way in.

Plan about 1 h 15 min
The interior can only be seen on a tour or with a ticket to a show; tours are limited and often sold as groups, and tours also run two hours before Coca-Cola Film Series screenings for anyone holding a film ticket

Midday

LunchMidtown along Peachtree and Crescent Avenue is thick with restaurants aimed at the office towers, which means good value at lunch and a wait after 19:00. The Varsity, ten minutes north-west, has been the city's drive-in since 1928 and is a rite of passage rather than a meal: a chili dog, onion rings and a frosted orange, ordered fast because the countermen do not wait.

Afternoon

2 km east, about 25 minutes on foot or 8 minutes by car; the 10th Street and 12th Street gates are the useful ones

3Park

Piedmont Park

Eighty-five hectares in Midtown that were a farm, then a racetrack, then the site of two great expositions, one of which in 1895 heard Booker T. Washington deliver the speech that W. E. B. Du Bois would call the Atlanta Compromise. Frederick Law Olmsted's firm shaped the grounds afterwards. What it is now is the city's front lawn: Lake Clara Meer with the Midtown towers standing up behind it, an active oval, a dog park, a swimming pool, the Atlanta Botanical Garden at the northern end, and the festivals that fill it through spring and autumn including the Dogwood Festival and Music Midtown. The view across the lake to the skyline is the photograph everyone takes in Atlanta after the Jackson Street Bridge.

Plan about 1 h 30 min
Free and open daily from 06:00 to 23:00; the Atlanta BeltLine Eastside Trail runs along its eastern edge and links it to Ponce City Market in twenty minutes on foot

Evening

1 km north through the park to the Piedmont Avenue entrance, about 15 minutes on foot

4Botanical garden

Atlanta Botanical Garden

Thirty hectares at the north end of Piedmont Park, and the glasshouse is the reason to come: the Fuqua Conservatory holds tropical and desert collections with a serious orchid house and a working conservation programme for endangered amphibians, and the Fuqua Orchid Center next to it keeps a high-elevation cloud-forest room that is one of very few in the world. Outside there is a Japanese garden, a 180-metre canopy walk suspended through the crowns of an urban woodland at eleven metres, an edible garden with a demonstration kitchen, and a hydrangea collection. The Chihuly glass installations that toured here in 2004 and 2016 left several pieces permanently. Garden Lights over Christmas sells out.

Plan about 2 h
Open Tuesday to Sunday with hours that shift by season, generally 09:00 to 19:00 in summer and shorter in winter, and closed Mondays outside peak periods; buy online, and note the garden and the park share an entrance area but are separate tickets

Morning

1Historic site

Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park

Two blocks of Auburn Avenue where Martin Luther King Jr. was born in 1929, grew up, was ordained, and was buried in 1968. The National Park Service runs the Visitor Center with an exhibition on the movement; Historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, where his father and then he preached and where recordings of his sermons play through the empty sanctuary; Freedom Hall; and the birth home at 501 Auburn Avenue, a Queen Anne house the family lived in until he was twelve. Across the street the King Center, run by the family rather than the Park Service, holds the tomb where he and Coretta Scott King lie in a marble crypt in a reflecting pool, with an eternal flame beside it. All of it is free.

Plan about 2 h 30 min
The Visitor Center, Historic Ebenezer Baptist Church and Freedom Hall are open 09:00 to 17:00 every day and everything is free; Dr. King's birth home is currently closed for renovations, though ranger-led programmes still run; all facilities close on 1 January, Thanksgiving Day and 25 December

The district runs west from the park along Auburn Avenue, about 10 minutes on foot

2Historic district

Sweet Auburn

Segregation shut Black Atlanta out of the white commercial centre, and what grew instead along Auburn Avenue was a self-sufficient district that Fortune magazine called the richest Negro street in the world in 1956: the Atlanta Life Insurance Company, the Atlanta Daily World, the country's first Black-owned radio station, the Royal Peacock club, churches, banks and the Prince Hall Masonic building where the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had its offices. The Downtown Connector freeway cut it in half in the 1960s and it declined sharply. The Sweet Auburn Curb Market of 1924, so named because Black vendors were originally confined to the kerb outside, still trades daily and is the best lunch in the district.

Plan about 1 h 30 min
Free to walk, and the eastern end runs into the King park; the Curb Market on Edgewood Avenue is open Monday to Saturday, roughly 08:00 to 18:00, and the APEX Museum on Auburn Avenue tells the district's own story

Midday

LunchThe Sweet Auburn Curb Market has been trading since 1924 and its counters are the right lunch on this particular day: Afro-Caribbean, soul food, a bakery and a very good sandwich stall, eaten at communal tables. If you would rather wait, Krog Street Market at the other end of the walk is smaller and newer and has a strong taqueria and a raw bar.

Afternoon

1 km south-east, about 12 minutes on foot or two stops on the streetcar

3Cemetery

Oakland Cemetery

Forty-eight acres laid out in 1850 as a rural garden cemetery, and the only substantial piece of nineteenth-century Atlanta that Sherman did not burn, which makes it the city's oldest surviving public space by a wide margin. About seventy thousand people are buried here, among them Margaret Mitchell, the golfer Bobby Jones, Maynard Jackson, six Georgia governors and roughly 6,900 Confederate soldiers, many unidentified. The Jewish section, the Black section that segregation imposed, the potter's field and the ostentatious Victorian family mausoleums sit in the same grid, which is a legible social history if you walk it slowly. The magnolias and the skyline behind the headstones are why photographers come.

Plan about 1 h 30 min
Free and open daily from dawn to dusk, with the visitor centre and shop open shorter hours; guided tours run at weekends for a small charge and are worth taking; it is a ten-minute walk from Sweet Auburn or a stop on the Atlanta Streetcar

1.5 km east through Cabbagetown, about 20 minutes on foot

4Street art

Krog Street Tunnel

A short, dank railway underpass between Inman Park and Cabbagetown that the city has effectively conceded to graffiti writers for decades. Every surface is painted, repainted over within days, and painted again, so the tunnel is never twice the same and none of it is preserved: political slogans, tags, band flyers, marriage proposals, memorials and a great deal of very good work that will be gone by the weekend. It floods when it rains and it smells. It is also the single most photographed thing in Atlanta after the skyline, it anchors the two neighbourhoods at either end, and the annual Krog Street Tunnel Halloween party is a local institution.

Plan about 30 min
Free and always open, and traffic still uses it, so keep to the narrow pavement; Krog Street Market for food is two minutes north and the BeltLine Eastside Trail crosses just above

Evening

2.5 km north along the BeltLine Eastside Trail, about 30 minutes on foot and the nicest walk in the city

5Market and mixed-use building

Ponce City Market

Sears, Roebuck built this in 1926 as a regional catalogue warehouse and retail store, two million square feet of brick along Ponce de Leon Avenue and for decades the largest building in the South. The city used it as offices, then abandoned it. It reopened in 2014 as a food hall, shops, offices and flats, and the food hall is genuinely good: several dozen counters including a Sean Brock diner, a proper taqueria and a Hong Kong-style bakery. On the roof, Skyline Park is a boardwalk-style amusement deck with a miniature golf course, a slide down through the building and a bar with the Midtown skyline in front of it. The BeltLine runs along the back, which is how most people arrive.

Plan about 2 h
The food hall is open daily, roughly 10:00 to 21:00 and later at weekends; the rooftop is ticketed separately and is best at sunset; the Eastside Trail of the BeltLine passes the rear entrance and links to Piedmont Park

Before you go

Good to know in Atlanta

The King park and the civil rights centre

At Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park the Visitor Center, Historic Ebenezer Baptist Church and Freedom Hall are open from 09:00 to 17:00 every day, and admission is free. Dr. King's birth home is currently closed for renovations, although ranger-led programmes still operate. All facilities close on 1 January, Thanksgiving Day and 25 December.Source: National Park Service — Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park, Operating Hours · checked Sep 2026
The National Center for Civil and Human Rights is open Tuesday to Saturday from 10:00 to 17:00 and Sunday from 12:00 to 17:00, with the last entry at 16:00, and closes on Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day. Tickets are non-refundable and the centre asks that e-tickets be ready on arrival.Source: National Center for Civil and Human Rights — Visit · checked Sep 2026

Midtown and downtown museums

The High Museum of Art is open Tuesday to Saturday from 10:00 to 17:00 and Sunday from noon to 17:00, and is closed on Mondays. The last ticket each day is issued one hour before closing, and tickets cover the collection galleries and most special exhibitions.Source: High Museum of Art — Visit · checked Sep 2026
The College Football Hall of Fame opens at 10:00 and closes at 17:00, with the last ticket sold at 16:30. Hours are subject to change and individual spaces may be closed for private events, so the venue asks visitors to check its space schedule before arriving.Source: College Football Hall of Fame — Hours, Directions and Parking · checked Sep 2026
World of Coca-Cola publishes its hours a week at a time, typically opening at 10:00 and closing between 19:00 and 21:00 depending on the day. Online ticket sales close one hour before closing time each day.Source: World of Coca-Cola — Plan Your Visit · checked Sep 2026

Questions

3 days in Atlanta: quick answers

Is 3 days enough for Atlanta?

Yes, and the geography helps: four major attractions share one block downtown, the arts are concentrated in Midtown, and the civil rights sites sit together on two blocks of Auburn Avenue. Three days covers all of it without hurrying. A fourth day would go to Stone Mountain, 25 km east, with a cable car and a very complicated Confederate carving; the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library; the Atlanta History Center in Buckhead with the restored Swan House; or simply more of the BeltLine, which now runs for many kilometres.

What is the best time of year to visit Atlanta?

March to May and September to November. Spring is the city's best season, with dogwoods and azaleas out in April and temperatures around 22 to 26°C, and it is also pollen season, which in Atlanta means a visible yellow film on every car for two weeks. Autumn is dry and mild. Summer runs 31 to 33°C with high humidity and daily afternoon thunderstorms. Winter is mild at around 12°C, with one or two ice events a year that shut the city down entirely because it has no equipment for them.

Do you need a car in Atlanta?

For this plan, no. MARTA's rail lines cover downtown, Midtown and the airport well, the Atlanta Streetcar links downtown to the King district, and the BeltLine Eastside Trail connects Piedmont Park, Krog Street and Ponce City Market on foot or by bike. Beyond that the city is very spread out and traffic on the Downtown Connector is among the worst in the country, so a car is a liability in the centre and a necessity for Stone Mountain or the northern suburbs. Ride-hailing fills the gaps cheaply.

How much does Atlanta cost per day?

The downtown attractions are the expense: the aquarium is around $45 for an adult, World of Coca-Cola about $20, the civil rights centre about $20, and the College Football Hall of Fame about $25, so day one alone can reach $110 a head. Combination passes cut that. Against it, the King park is free, Piedmont Park and Oakland Cemetery are free, and the BeltLine is free. A hostel bed runs $35 to $55, a mid-range hotel $150 to $250, a meat-and-three lunch under $20 and a good dinner $50 to $80.

Is the Martin Luther King Jr. site worth visiting?

It is the reason many people come to Atlanta, and it is free. The two blocks hold the house where he was born, the church where three generations of his family preached and where recordings of his sermons play to an empty sanctuary, the National Park Service exhibition, and the tomb where he and Coretta Scott King lie in a reflecting pool with an eternal flame. Allow two to three hours and take it slowly. Note that the birth home itself is closed for renovations at present, though ranger-led programmes continue.

What is the Atlanta BeltLine?

A ring of disused railway corridor around the inner city, being converted into a 35 km loop of trail, parks and eventually light rail. The Eastside Trail is the finished showpiece: about 5 km of paved path from Piedmont Park through the Old Fourth Ward to Reynoldstown, lined with murals, breweries, restaurants and the rear entrance of Ponce City Market, and busy with walkers, runners and cyclists at every hour. It has also driven property prices up sharply along its route, which is a live local argument. Rent a bike or walk a section; it is the best way to see how the city is changing.

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3 Days in Atlanta

The Olympic park block, then Midtown and Piedmont Park, then Auburn Avenue and the BeltLine

Ways to use these days