Richmond Guide

Richmond is the state capital and the hardest, most honest city in Virginia — the capital of the Confederacy that has spent the last few years dismantling the mythology built on top of it. Between 2020 and 2021 the city pulled down the Confederate monuments that gave Monument Avenue its name, and the graffiti-covered pedestal where Robert E. Lee stood for 130 years became, for a while, one of the most photographed protest sites in America; the statues are gone and the reckoning is the story now. But Richmond is also a food town punching far above its weight, a mural city (the RVA Street Art Festival has splashed hundreds of walls), and a place where 135-acre Hollywood Cemetery holds two U.S. presidents — James Monroe under his Gothic “Birdcage” canopy and John Tyler — on a bluff over the James River rapids. Maymont, a 100-acre Gilded Age estate with a Japanese garden and free grounds, sits nearby.