Asheville Audio Tours

Asheville occupies a high valley in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina, and its downtown is a near-complete Art Deco time capsule from the 1920s and 1930s. The city built extravagantly during the boom years, then eight local banks collapsed on a single day in November 1930, leaving the city too indebted to tear anything down. Decades of poverty preserved every cornice and storefront, so the S&W Cafeteria building, the City Hall rotunda, and the Jackson Building, the city's first skyscraper, all stand as they were when Franklin Roosevelt was taking his first term.

George Vanderbilt began building the Biltmore Estate south of downtown in 1889 and finished it six years later with 250 rooms, making it the largest private residence in the United States, a record it still holds.

The estate's Chateau architecture and Frederick Law Olmsted-designed grounds feel both absurd and genuinely magnificent in these Appalachian foothills. Elsewhere in the city, the River Arts District occupies old industrial warehouses along the French Broad River, with working studios where you can watch potters, painters, and metalworkers in progress. On summer Saturdays, the free Shindig on the Green event on Pack Square brings out old-time and bluegrass musicians for a gathering that has been going since 1928.