Explore Durham

The Bull City has American Tobacco Campus, Duke Gardens, a booming food scene, and a creative energy that surprises everyone who visits for the first time.

Durham has reinvented itself into one of the most compelling cities in the South. From the restored tobacco warehouses at American Tobacco Campus to the blooming cherry trees at Duke Gardens each spring, there is a lot to discover here. It is a city with real grit and real beauty, and the food scene alone is worth the drive from anywhere in the Triangle.

Gritty, Creative, and Entirely Itself

Durham earned its nickname from a tobacco brand. The Durham Bull, a symbol of the W. Duke Sons & Co. tobacco empire, put this scrappy railroad town on the map in the late 1800s, and the city spent much of the twentieth century as an industrial workhorse, proud, hardworking, and not particularly interested in impressing anyone. That identity stuck even as the tobacco money dried up. Durham never became precious about itself. It just got interesting on its own terms.

The transformation of the old American Tobacco Campus, a sprawling former cigarette factory turned restaurant, music, and office complex at the edge of downtown, captures what Durham did right. Instead of tearing things down, the city repurposed them. The Durham Bulls Athletic Park arrived in 1995. James Beard Award winning chefs started opening restaurants. Craft breweries moved into old warehouses. Duke University, one of the world's top research institutions, has always been here, but the city around it has finally built a scene that stands on its own.

Today Durham is one of the most interesting mid size cities in the South, genuinely diverse, consistently creative, and impossible to mistake for anywhere else. The food scene is legitimately excellent. The music venues are real. The people who live here tend to love it fiercely, which is usually a good sign.