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.