Things to Do in Missouri, United States: City Guides

The best things to do in Missouri range from exploring major cities and historic river towns to discovering barbecue traditions, music, literature, lakes, and changing landscapes. Known as the Show Me State, Missouri is shaped by the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, its westward-looking history, and a cultural mix of Midwestern and Southern influences. Neywo offers free audio guides for 3 cities in Missouri, covering 203 narrated places in total.

What to see and do in Missouri

Explore Missouri’s history

People have lived in present-day Missouri for at least 12,000 years. Before European arrival, the Mississippian culture built cities with pyramidal and ceremonial mounds, while the Osage and Missouria nations inhabited the region. The state takes its name from the Missouri River, whose name comes from the Missouria. Their name means “one who has dugout canoes.”

French colonists made the territory part of Louisiana and founded Ste. Genevieve and St. Louis. After a short period of Spanish rule, the United States acquired Missouri through the Louisiana Purchase. Settlers from the Upland South came to its productive agricultural plains, and the state became a major departure point for expeditions and settlers heading west. This role earned Missouri the name Gateway to the West.

Missouri’s route to statehood was marked by conflict. It entered the Union as a slave state under the Missouri Compromise. During the Civil War, it was a border state divided by rival governments, raids, and guerrilla warfare. After the war, St. Louis and Kansas City developed into major centers of industry and business.

To explore this history through places and landmarks, visit Saint Louis, with 109 narrated places, or Kansas City, with 91.

Visit Missouri’s cities

Missouri’s cities reflect different parts of the state’s identity.

In Saint Louis, the Gateway Arch recalls the city’s role in westward expansion. Other narrated places include Campbell House Museum, Magic Chef Mansion, and Scott Joplin House State Historic Site. The city also connects Missouri’s history with architecture, music, and the Mississippi River.

Kansas City offers a different urban character. Its narrated places include The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Black Archives of Mid-America, the National World War I Memorial, and the National Airline History Museum. The city is also central to Missouri’s musical and barbecue traditions.

Branson is a smaller destination known for entertainment. Its three narrated places include the Titanic Museum, Hollywood Wax Museum, and Shoji Tabuchi Theatre. You can find the city’s audio guide on the Branson page.

Listen for Missouri’s music and literature

Missouri’s cultural character brings together Midwestern and Southern influences. The state is the birthplace of ragtime, Kansas City jazz, and St. Louis blues. It has also been home to musicians including Chuck Berry, Josephine Baker, Tina Turner, Sheryl Crow, and Nelly.

Literature is just as closely connected to the state. Mark Twain was born in Missouri, and his novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are set in his boyhood hometown of Hannibal. St. Louis was the native city of writers Kate Chopin, T. S. Eliot, and Tennessee Williams.

Missouri’s unofficial nickname, the Show Me State, also expresses a local attitude. The phrase is associated with skepticism and the saying, “I’m from Missouri, you’ll have to show me.” Congressman Willard Vandiver popularized it in 1900, when he declared that frothy eloquence neither convinced nor satisfied him. The nickname appears on Missouri license plates.

Try the state’s barbecue, beer, and wine

Food and drink carry strong local identities in Missouri. Kansas City-style barbecue is widely known, while St. Louis-style barbecue offers a second tradition associated with the state’s other major urban center. Together, they represent two distinct barbecue cultures found across Missouri and beyond.

Beer is another important part of the state’s story. Missouri is home to Anheuser-Busch, described as the world’s largest beer producer, and has some of the most permissive alcohol laws in the United States.

Wine has a particular setting in the Missouri Rhineland. Agriculture also remains central to the state, whose products include beef, soybeans, pork, dairy products, corn, poultry, cotton, rice, and eggs. Missouri’s food culture connects urban traditions with the farms and agricultural plains that supply them.

Discover rivers, plains, lakes, and hills

Missouri is landlocked but borders eight states, a total matched only by neighboring Tennessee. Its setting is defined especially by the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Table Rock Lake, the Lake of the Ozarks, and many smaller rivers and streams add to the state’s abundance of fresh water.

North of the Missouri River, and in some places just south of it, the Northern Plains contain rolling hills left by glaciation that once extended from the Canadian Shield to the river. Most of the state has a humid continental climate, with cool and sometimes cold winters and hot, humid, wet summers. In the southern Bootheel, conditions become humid subtropical.

The result is a varied natural setting rather than one single landscape: great rivers, glacial hills, lakes, agricultural plains, and warmer conditions in the south. Missouri also supports diverse plant and animal life, including species found only in particular areas.

Explore Missouri with Neywo’s free audio guides

Neywo has free audio guides for 3 Missouri cities, with 203 narrated places in total and 12 walking tours. Narration is available in 11 languages. The app tells the story of each place as you reach it, at your own pace, with no group and no schedule. Download Neywo and explore Missouri through the places that shape its history, culture, cities, and landscapes.