Walmart’s hometown in Arkansas just became the No. 1 place to visit in America

A small Ozark city that’s rewriting the map

Bentonville, Arkansas, sits in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains in the northwest corner of the state, and until recently, most people knew it as Walmart’s hometown. That’s changing fast.

Travel + Leisure just named it the top destination in the country for 2026, and the New York Times put it on its “52 Places to Go” list the same year.

Art, trails, and a walkable downtown have a way of doing that to a place.

From Sam Walton’s five-and-dime to free world-class art

Alice Walton, daughter of Walmart founder Sam Walton, founded Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and opened it on Nov. 11, 2011.

Architect Moshe Safdie designed a series of pavilions around two spring-fed ponds on 120 acres of Ozark forest.

The permanent collection spans five centuries of American art, from colonial-era portraits to work made in the last decade. General admission has been free since the day the doors opened, and it still is.

A 114,000-square-foot expansion opens in June 2026

Crystal Bridges grows by 50 percent when its new addition opens June 6 and 7, 2026.

Safdie Architects designed the expansion to include two new galleries, art studios, educational spaces, a community floor, a new cafe, and an outdoor plaza.

Every gallery in the existing building gets a fresh hang, with every work of art moved and reinstalled.

Dallas collectors Candace and Michael Humphreys gave more than 200 works to mark the occasion, the largest gift in the museum’s history. All of it stays free.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Norman Rockwell and Rosie the Riveter — all free

The collection holds some of the most recognized names in American art.

Norman Rockwell’s Rosie the Riveter hangs here, along with Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 and Asher B. Durand’s Kindred Spirits, a landmark Hudson River School painting.

The newly opened Visions of America Galleries organize the full collection into five themes: We, Dreaming, Nature, Making Our Mark and We the People.

Recent additions have also brought in more Indigenous art and craft.

Three major exhibitions land at Crystal Bridges in 2026

America 250: Common Threads opened in March 2026, tracing how American art has shaped national identity across 250 years.

In summer 2026, Keith Haring in 3D arrives as the first exhibition to put the iconic artist’s work into three dimensions, displayed in a 14,000-square-foot naturally lit gallery.

Fall brings Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work, a fresh look at folk art legend Anna Mary Robertson Moses. All three are included with free general admission.

A Frank Lloyd Wright house moved 1,200 miles to the museum grounds

The five miles of trails winding through Crystal Bridges’ 120 acres hold more than trees.

James Turrell’s Skyspace, The Way of Color, is a stone chamber where LED lights shift your perception of the sky at dawn and dusk. Yayoi Kusama’s Narcissus Garden floats hundreds of mirrored spheres on water.

The Bachman-Wilson House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, was dismantled in New Jersey and rebuilt on the museum grounds in 2015. You can walk through it free, with a self-guided audio tour in English or Spanish.

A cheese factory turned into a 63,000-square-foot art space

The Momentary sits in downtown Bentonville inside a former cheese factory transformed by Wheeler Kearns Architects.

It opened Feb. 22, 2020, as a satellite of Crystal Bridges and runs rotating exhibitions in visual and performing arts, live music, festivals, and artists-in-residence. A 70-foot-tall tower space anchors the building.

Near the entrance, a site-specific neon sculpture by Tavares Strachan reads “You Belong Here.” Admission is free.

550 miles of trails make this the mountain biking capital of the world

Bentonville claims the title of Mountain Biking Capital of the World, and the OZ Trails network across Northwest Arkansas backs it up with over 550 miles of shared-use trails.

The Slaughter Pen system starts minutes from downtown with dozens of miles of single-track across all skill levels.

Coler Mountain Bike Preserve, about a mile west of downtown, runs flow trails, technical rock sections, and gap jumps.

The Razorback Greenway, a paved path stretching more than 40 miles, connects Bentonville to neighboring communities and runs right past Crystal Bridges.

Walk the town square and see where Walmart began

The Bentonville Town Square ties the city together on foot.

The Walmart Museum sits right on the square in the same building where Sam Walton opened his first family-name store in 1950, and admission is free.

A few blocks away, the Museum of Native American History holds more than 10,000 Indigenous artifacts spanning 14,000 years, also free.

Public art and murals show up throughout downtown, and starting in April, a farmers market runs on the square each week.

Wetlands, woodland gardens and a playscape in the trees

Green space runs through Bentonville in a way most small cities can’t match. Osage Park covers a 12-acre wetland ecosystem with floating boardwalks and a prairie garden.

Compton Gardens, a 6.5-acre space with woodland plantings and native collections, connects downtown to Crystal Bridges through the trail system.

The Crystal Bridges grounds put on a spring show with dogwoods, redbuds, and magnolias. The Peel Museum and Botanical Garden gives you free tours of an 1875 mansion and its surrounding gardens.

Two or three days here and you’ve barely scratched the surface

Most of what draws people to Bentonville costs nothing to walk into. The museums are free, the trails are free, and the downtown is built to explore on foot or by bike.

Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport sits about 13 miles away, with an average drive time of about 25 minutes. The city runs annual events including the Bentonville Film Festival and mountain bike races.

Between the art, the trails, and the square, two days goes fast and three still leaves things undone.

The June 2026 expansion makes this the year to go

Bentonville has collected serious national recognition from Travel + Leisure, the New York Times, and the Today Show, and the timing lines up with something worth seeing.

The Crystal Bridges expansion opens in June 2026, making this a landmark year for a museum that already draws visitors from across the country.

Free art, hundreds of miles of trails, and a downtown you can walk end to end — all of it in a city in Arkansas that most people didn’t have on their radar five years ago.

Visit Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas

Crystal Bridges is at 600 Museum Way in Bentonville, open every day except Tuesday, with free general admission. If you want to take in the expansion, plan your trip around the June 6 and 7, 2026, opening.

The Momentary is at 507 SE E Street in downtown Bentonville, open Tuesday through Sunday, also free. The Walmart Museum and Museum of Native American History are both free and close to the town square.

Trails connect most of the major spots, so you can walk or bike between them.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

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