Overview
Seattle is the dynamic “Emerald City” of the US Pacific Northwest, set between Puget Sound and Lake Washington beneath the snow-capped Mount Rainier. Home of Pike Place Market and the original Starbucks, the Space Needle, a tech and coffee culture and a grunge-music legacy, it pairs a buzzing waterfront city with easy access to mountains, islands and forests.
Travel
Seattle is built on hills between salt water and fresh, with mountains on three sides and, on the days it shows itself, a snow-covered volcano on the southern horizon — and that setting is more than scenery here, because it decides how the city is used. Water is transport: the state ferries crossing Puget Sound are commuter routes that happen to deliver the finest view of the skyline anywhere. The hills are viewpoints, and the reason a short walk uphill from downtown produces the postcard. The mountains are a weekend, with three national parks inside a few hours. In the middle of it sits a compact and genuinely walkable core — a market above the waterfront that has traded since 1907, the 1962 World's Fair campus with its needle and its glass museum, and neighbourhoods that carry the city's distinct inheritances: Scandinavian Ballard, historic Pioneer Square, the Chinatown-International District, restless Capitol Hill. Add the coffee culture the city exported to the world and the music it produced in the early nineties, and there is more here than a two-day stop. One planning fact governs everything: the summer, roughly July into September, is dry and glorious and quite unlike the grey, drizzly rest of the year.
Pike Place Market is the soul of Seattle and the essential first stop — one of the oldest continuously operating public markets in the United States, tumbling down the hillside above Elliott Bay since 1907. Beneath its famous clock and “Public Market” sign, a warren of stalls and shops sells fresh fish (where the fishmongers theatrically toss salmon), flowers, fruit, crafts and street food, alongside characterful eateries, the gum-covered “Gum Wall” and the original 1971 Starbucks store across Pike Place. Below the market, the revitalised central waterfront along Alaskan Way — reborn after the removal of an old elevated highway — strings together piers, parks, restaurants, the Seattle Aquarium and the Seattle Great Wheel, with views across Puget Sound to the Olympic Mountains and ferries gliding in and out. From here you can take a harbour cruise or hop a Washington State Ferry across the Sound for the classic skyline view. Together, the market and the waterfront capture Seattle's blend of working port, food culture and natural setting, and they are where most visits begin.
Frequently asked questions
Diplomatic missions in Seattle
2 embassies based in this city, grouped by region.
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