Belle Isle Park

The island the French once called Ile aux Cochons, or Hog Island, became a public park when Detroit bought it in the 1870s and renamed it Belle Isle. To design it the city hired Frederick Law Olmsted, whose plan embraced the low, marshy island's natural character with winding canals, meadows, and woodlands rather than forcing it into stiff formal gardens.

Over the decades the city added the ornate buildings that give the island its charm: a casino pavilion, the aquarium, the conservatory, and a magnificent white marble fountain. Belle Isle became the great democratic backyard of Detroit, a place where families of every background came to escape the heat, and generations of Detroiters carry memories of summers there.

The Belle Isle Aquarium opened in 1904 and is one of the oldest public aquariums in the country, a long, narrow gallery famous for its arched, green opalescent-glass ceiling that glows like being underwater. Closed for a stretch in the 2000s, it was reopened by dedicated volunteers and remains a beloved, atmospheric place to see freshwater and exotic fish.

Next door, the Anna Scott Whitcomb Conservatory rises under a great glass dome, sheltering palms, orchids, cacti, and seasonal flower shows through Michigan's long winters. Designed by the same architect as the aquarium, the two buildings together form one of the island's most-loved corners, especially on a gray day when the warmth and green feel like a small escape.

The James Scott Memorial Fountain, dedicated in 1925, anchors the island's western end, a broad marble basin ringed with lions and turtles that throws water high with the Detroit skyline behind it. It was funded by a controversial local figure and remains one of the grandest public fountains in the Midwest.

Elsewhere the island holds the white marble Livingstone Memorial Lighthouse, a small maritime museum, a nature center, canals for paddling, and beaches on the river. From the shore you can watch freighters slide by on one of the busiest inland shipping channels in the world, with Windsor, Ontario, just across the water.

Belle Isle sits just off the heart of Detroit, a city with a deep history of music, industry, and reinvention. The riverfront, the museums of Midtown, and the neighborhoods of the east side are all a short drive away, and the island is one of the best places to take in the skyline and the international border river that shaped the city.

This is Anishinaabe homeland, long a gathering place for the Ojibwe (Chippewa), Odawa (Ottawa), and Potawatomi peoples of the Three Fires Confederacy, as well as the Wyandot, whose communities lived and traded along the Detroit River. The word Detroit comes from the French for the strait, the narrows between the lakes that made this a crossroads long before the auto industry arrived.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.