#15
ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO
New Mexico’s sunny city gets top nods for its abundance of craft brewpubs, such as downtown’s Marble Brewery and Bow & Arrow Brewery Co. The latter serves its unusual sour and aged ales in a cavernous hall lit with iron chandeliers. Local breweries also often partner with food trucks that park outside to cook up lamb burgers, green-chili-topped hot dogs, and spicy Southwestern-style pizza.
The most exciting travel story in America right now? The resurgence of cities large and small.
At Nat Geo Travel, we’re passionate about tales of urban renewal, about communities that have collaborated to improve their Main Streets, about smart cities that have pursued development policies that produce happiness.
For this story, we partnered with Resonance Consultancy, a global destination branding advisor, to identify the top U.S. small cities based on unconventional metrics that we think lead to happiness: green spaces, galleries, coffee shops, breweries, music venues, Instagrammable moments, and more.
Next we sorted U.S. cities into three groups based on their population: 40K-100K, 100K-200K, and 200K-600K.
Resonance combined core statistics with social media data (from Yelp, Instagram, and other sources) on nightlife, culture, restaurants, and the like to determine the city leaders for each population group in categories from meatiest (lots of steakhouses and delis) to greenest (most parkland), based on per capita results.
Finally, Traveler editors added in trending cities—towns that didn’t make Resonance’s final cut this year but look as if they could in 2019. Keep your eye on them.
Six places on our list (Boulder, Colorado; Honolulu, Hawaii; Charlottesville, Virginia; Santa Cruz, California; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Portland, Maine) also appear on a National Geographic list of the happiest cities in America. Happy places for locals are also rewarding places for travelers.
We hope our list of 30 cities inspires enlightening discoveries.
By: George Stoneand Amy Alipio
Reported by Jennifer Barger (Travel)
Click here to view source article.
By: George Stoneand Amy Alipio
Reported by Jennifer Barger (Travel)
Click here to view source article.
