Olympia Audio Tours

Olympia sits at the southern tip of Puget Sound, where the salt water fingers into mudflats and the fir trees close in from every direction. As Washington's state capital, it holds an architectural centerpiece in the 1928 Legislative Building, whose 287-foot dome is one of the largest masonry domes in the United States, modeled loosely on St. Peter's Basilica and visible from across Capitol Lake. But Olympia's personality owes as much to Evergreen State College, its radical liberal arts school founded in 1967 on a progressive curriculum that famously has no grades and no departments.

That collegiate culture seeded a music scene that punched well above the city's weight.

Bands including Sleater-Kinney, Beat Happening, and Bikini Kill emerged from Olympia in the late 1980s and 1990s, giving the city a particular claim on the genealogy of American indie rock and riot grrrl. The downtown farmers' market on Capitol Way runs Thursday through Sunday from April to October and occupies a covered pavilion where oysters from the nearby Mud Bay and mushrooms from the Cascade foothills share stall space with radical zines and handmade ceramics.