This website uses cookies to improve your browsing experience and analyze the use of the website. Learn More. Accept X. Our tour guides spend a lot of time exploring the city of Nashville and learning about its history, and they've come up with a pretty impressive self-guided tour of the downtown area. Join us for a walk through downtown Nashville as we cover the history of this town from its beginnings as Fort Nashborough through the Civil War, Civil Rights, and Country Music to today.
The whole tour takes about 2 hours - that is if you don't step inside any of the museums or restaurants. Listen to a sample of our Downtown Nashville Tour:. Self-Guided Walking Tour of Nashville:. We begin our tour of Nashville here at the Visitor Center. You can go inside to grab a bottle of water or use the restrooms before we get started, but we're about to venture on a 2-mile walk together so maybe hold off on the souvenir shopping.
We end the tour not far from here so you can always come back. We will talk about the history of Nashville at a later stop and how it got started, but let's use this stop to talk about what Nashville is today.
Nashville is the capital of Tennessee and of country music. These are two facts that most people know about the city already. But did you know that there is a huge printing industry here? Or that Maxwell Coffee is from Nashville? We'll talk about this and more on our tour. Nashville's nickname is Music City. Depending on what time of day you are standing at this corner, you may be able to see why the name has stuck. Live music is played most of the day and night somewhere in the city.
But this isn't how the nickname got started. It all began with No, seriously. Fisk University, a historically black university, was founded in just after the end of the American Civil War, as a school for freedmen.
