Portland, Oregon - Portland Travel Guide

Portland (OR), Oregon

Portland, Oregon (cc)

A delectable brew of liberals, bookworms, beer snobs, coffee aficionados, foodies, environmentalists and holdovers from the hippie era. There are more microbreweries here than in any other city in the world, the largest bookshop anywhere, a café culture that continues to proliferate, and scores of up-and-coming restaurants with innovative cuisine that'll knock your socks off.

Portland Travel Guide

Introduction

Portland is a delectable brew of liberals, bookworms, beer snobs, coffee aficionados, foodies, environmentalists and conservationists, and holdovers from the hippie era. It's among the premier "pinko" cities of the West Coast – right up there with San Francisco and Seattle – and yet the smallest and thus the most underrated of the lot. Still, it has more microbreweries than any other city in the world, the largest bookshop in the world – think Powell's, a veritable book city, multi-tiered and a block long – a café culture that continues to proliferate, scores of up-and-coming restaurants with innovative cuisine that have set the culinary world on its ear, no dearth of rose bushes and bridges – the latter due to the city straddling the Willamette River – and neighborhoods with character and uniqueness, each a discovery waiting to be made. And lest we forget, Portland is also a genuinely green city – the second greenest in the world, after Reykjavik, Iceland – with an abundance of bicycles and organic markets, and, too, a vital and quintessentially progressive hub of “Blue America,” at once offbeat, weird, stirring, and fiercely independent. Ultimately, few if any would dispute that Portland is a city that positively rocks! no matter how you slice it.

Location

Portland is located on the north coast of the State of Oregon in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S., close to the border of Washington State. It sits on the banks of the Willamette River, near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers.

How to Get There

Sightseeing

Neighborhoods

How to Get Around

Where to Stay

Where to Eat

Where to Party

Essential Information

Nearby Destinations

How to Get There

Portland can be reached by air on any of several domestic airlines, with commercial flights arriving and departing from the Portland Airport. It can also be reached by road directly on Interstate 5, from either Seattle in the north or San Francisco in the south. Amtrak also has a Cascades rail service to Portland from Seattle and Vancouver up the coast, as well as from Eugene farther inland in Oregon.

Sightseeing

Main Neighborhoods