Discover Columbus

Columbus is the capital of Ohio and its largest city, laid out from scratch in 1812 on the Scioto river specifically to be a capital — which is why the Greek Revival statehouse sits on a square in the middle of a grid rather than at the end of a grand approach.

It is a university city as much as a government one. Ohio State has one of the largest student bodies in the country, and its stadium holds over a hundred thousand people on autumn Saturdays, which reorganises the whole city around football for a day at a time. The Short North, the strip between downtown and the campus, is the gallery, restaurant and bar district, with metal arches over the street and a gallery hop on the first Saturday of each month.

German Village, just south of downtown, is a restored nineteenth-century neighbourhood of brick streets and small houses built by German settlers, with a bookshop occupying a former theatre that is one of the largest in the country. The Columbus Museum of Art, the Franklin Park Conservatory and the science centre are all central. The city has grown faster than the rest of Ohio for decades and has the food and music scene to match. Summers are humid, winters cold; spring and autumn are the comfortable seasons.