The Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, located 15 minutes from downtown Richmond, lights up every holiday season. This year’s Dominion Energy GardenFest of Lights runs from November 18 to January 5, 2025. Photo courtesy of Richmond Region Tourism

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The Virginia Women’s Monument features life-sized bronze statues of women from the state, including Cockacoeske, a Pamunkey chieftain; Jamestown colonist Anne Burras Laydon; frontierswoman Mary Draper Ingles; entrepreneur Laura Copenhaver; teacher Virginia Randolph; and Adèle Clark, suffragist and artist. Photo Abby Nurnberger, courtesy Richmond Region Tourism

Once viewed as a buttoned-up town with a dark history, Richmond today is owning its past and blossoming into a vibrant metropolis that celebrates diversity of all kinds.

The city’s multiple museums offer days of contemplation. One of Richmond’s many history museums, The Valentine Museum, offers an introductory overview of Richmond’s jewels, warts and wrinkles.

Situated in the former studio of sculptor Edward Valentine, the museum includes an exhibit on the “Lost Cause” myth — an ideology attempting to justify the Civil War and slavery as a states’ rights issue.

Other exhibits tell the stories of Indigenous people, African Americans, Civil Rights and women’s suffrage activists, and Richmond’s industries, from Reynolds Metal to Lucky Strike. Photographs and artifacts also focus on the city’s distinctive neighborhoods, like The Fan, which is lined with Victorian rowhouses.

A five-minute walk from The Valentine is the historic State Capitol, where the state legislature has met since 1788. It was designed by Thomas Jefferson, who was inspired by France’s Maison Carrée, a classical Roman temple.

Walk-in visitors can join a free guided tour inside to gaze at the rotunda and its life-size marble sculpture of George Washington.

On Capitol Square, 12 life-size bronze statues represent a group of accomplished Virginia women whose lives spanned four centuries. Among those whose likeness is preserved by the Virginia Women’s Monument are Cockacoeske, a Native American tribal chief, Clementina Rind, the colony’s public printer, and Adele Goodman Clark, a founder of the state’s Equal Suffrage League.

Nearby, the Civil Rights Memorial honors Barbara Johns — the courageous 16-year-old who staged a school walkout protesting racial segregation. She is flanked by seven other desegregation crusaders standing under her comment, “It seemed like reaching for the moon.”

The Virginia Holocaust Museum, located in a former tobacco warehouse on the James River, tracks the Ipson family’s 1943 escape from a Lithuanian ghetto. They hid for six months in a cellar, “the potato hole,” before emigrating to America and settling in Richmond.

Among the museum’s 6,000 artifacts and 1,400 documents is a piece of original barbed-wire fence from the Dachau concentration camp.

The Beth Ahabah Museum recognizes Jewish people who came to the Virginia territory as early as 1650 and created a thriving community in the city. It is located in a synagogue of the same name situated in the city’s Fan District (named for the streets that fan out from Monroe Park).

Black history

Richmond, like the rest of Virginia, has both scars of racism and many heroes.

A few blocks from Shockoe Bottom, the country’s second-largest slave trading center, the Reconciliation Statue memorializes the slave trade and a self-guided Slave Trail unravels slavery’s mechanics and evils.

In historic Jackson Ward, the “birthplace of Black Capitalism,” Maggie Walker’s home tells a story of empowerment. As the first African American woman bank president, she “turned nickels into dollars.”

When, from the 1860s to the 1930s, white establishments refused to serve Black people, she created a bank, department store, insurance company, newspaper and Girl Scout troop. Her bronze statue is a noble presence at Adams and West Broad Streets.

At the Black History Museum and Cultural Center, exhibits recount slavery from Egypt to the present, along with stories from enslaved people’s resistance, the Jim Crow era and the Civil Rights Movement. Visitors learn that in 1849, Henry “Box” Brown, an enslaved man, mailed himself to Philadelphia abolitionists in a wooden crate, a 27-hour journey.

Another statue pays tribute to the well-known Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the famous dancer from Richmond remembered for tapping up and down stairs in a complex rhythmic pattern. He was the country’s most highly-paid African American entertainer in the early 20th century.

The city’s historic Monument Avenue no longer has towering statues of Confederate generals, but it does have one of tennis great and Richmonder Arthur Ashe who, surrounded by children, holds a tennis racket in one hand and a book in the other.

Art and nature

Located on Arthur Ashe Boulevard is Richmond’s most internationally acclaimed museum, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, which offers free admission.

Its collection includes Himalayan and Indian art as well as works by Goya, Delacroix, John Singer Sargent and Winslow Homer, and images by photographers Gordon Parks and Sally Mann.

In the 135-acre park-like Hollywood Cemetery (named for its holly trees, not Tinseltown), funerary art and nature intermingle amid winding roads and paths, mausoleums, reliquaries, obelisks, urns, pyramids and crosses.

It is the resting place for 80,000 people, including U.S. presidents John Tyler and James Monroe; governors and other Virginia luminaries; and local writer Ellen Glasgow, who often satirized Richmond families.

To research the master of the macabre, the Poe Museum is the place to go. Museum-goers can gain a few insights into poet Edgar Allen Poe — from his turbulent childhood in Richmond as an adoptee, to his mysterious death in Baltimore at age 40.

Artifacts, including a lock of his hair and a piece of his coffin, rest in dim light on creaky floors. There’s even a black cat named Edgar wandering around the garden.

War history

Virginia has been at the center of several wars. Historic St. John’s Church is where Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” oration was delivered in 1775. The Church now stages reenactments of that speech several times during the year and weekly in the summer.

Muskets are fired daily at 1 p.m. at the American Civil War Museum, located on the site of the Tredegar Iron Works, an arsenal that made cannons for the Confederate army.

The museum tells the war’s story and legacy from multiple perspectives, including that of women, free and enslaved people of color from both the North and South, Indigenous people and soldiers.

The “1865 Fall of Richmond” exhibit there showcases a Confederate battle flag captured by Tad Lincoln, President Abraham Lincoln’s 12-year-old son, when they visited the city two days after the South’s surrender.

The Virginia War Memorial honors those who served in more recent wars, including World Wars I and II, Korea and the Persian Gulf.

The Virginia Museum of History and Culture’s upcoming Vietnam War exhibit, from November 23 to July 6, 2025, will feature oral histories of some of the 230,000 Virginians who served.

Nature aglow

Just outside Richmond, the 50-acre Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden is worth a visit in any season. Its 15 themed gardens showcase perennials, roses, shrubs, vegetables, wetland plants and native trees.

Winter is a good time to study the gardens’ “bones,” colorful berries and fuzzy buds. In the domed conservatory you’ll find cacti, orchids, other tropical and subtropical plants and butterflies.

The garden’s Dominion Energy GardenFest of Lights is an annual winter display of more than one million lights, including 110 trees glowing with them. USA Today named the garden’s 2023 show the number-one botanical garden holiday light show in the country. This year’s show runs from November 18 to January 5, 2025.

If you go

Richmond is 106 miles south of Washington, D.C. While Amtrak has several daily trains to the downtown Main Street Station and to Staples Mill, seven miles northwest of downtown, a car comes in handy to see Richmond’s different neighborhoods. Parking is easy and often free.

There are many lodging choices, like the historic Linden Row Inn, with its indoor courtyard (nightly rates range from $155-$310 per night), or the Quirk Hotel, where guests relax on raspberry-colored sofas and in a rooftop bar (nightly rates start at $196).

Some travelers splurge on the five-star Jefferson Hotel, which opened in 1895 and has hosted notables like Elvis Presley, Dolly Parton and 13 U.S. presidents. Rates start at $319 per night.

Richmond has restaurants for every pocketbook and taste. Mama J’s in Jackson Ward serves classic Southern fried chicken, catfish, collard greens, mac and cheese and pineapple-coconut cake.

The Rappahannock Oyster Company specializes in seafood, including Virginia oysters. Kuba Kuba serves Cuban fare. Perly’s is a popular kosher-style deli downtown.

For more ideas about what to visit, do and eat, see visitrichmondva.com, richmondmagazine.com or historicstjohnschurch.org/reenactments.