Live Music Capital of the World — where Sixth Street runs country and blues and punk and hip-hop simultaneously on 300 nights a year, the Texas State Capitol is taller than the US Capitol in Washington, and barbecue is taken more seriously here than in any other American city
Austin (978,000; metro 2.3 million) is the state capital of Texas and has been the fastest-growing large American city for most of the 2010s–2020s, driven by the migration of tech companies (Tesla, Apple, Oracle, Dell, Samsung) and a creative economy built on live music, film (South by Southwest), and independent culture that coexisted with the state government since the 1970s. Sixth Street (East 6th Street, the entertainment district) runs blues, country, rock, and hip-hop simultaneously seven nights a week, with around 250 live music venues across the city — the SXSW festival (South by Sout…
The Austin area was inhabited by Tonkawa, Comanche, and Apache peoples before Spanish colonial exploration. Mirabeau Lamar, the second president of the Republic of Texas, chose the site on the Colorado River as the new capital in 1839, naming it for Stephen F. Austin (the 'Father of Texas') — a deliberate statement of ambition at the western edge of Anglo settlement. Austin became the permanent capital of Texas when it joined the United States in 1845, and the current Texas State Capitol (1888) was designed specifically to be two feet taller than the US Capitol in Washington as a statement of…