Louisville on a budget

Best free attractions

Louisville's free hours are best spent outdoors. The city sits on the Ohio River and has spent the last century filling both banks (Kentucky and southern Indiana) with parks that ask nothing at the gate: a downtown waterfront, a Devonian fossil bed, a concrete bowl the skaters built a scene around, a Frederick Law Olmsted trio in the Highlands, the South End and the West End, a wooded state park east of town, an Indiana bluff over the river, and 6,500-plus acres of protected forest at the southern county line. The ten below are ranked by how well they hold up to a return visit, not by how photogenic they are on a first one. Read them as a working editor's shortlist for a city where the cheapest day out is almost always the best one: a river to walk, a park to run, a fossil bed to squat over, a canopy to disappear into. Bring water. Wear the shoes you don't mind muddying.