Destination Information - Boise, Idaho, USA

To explore Boise's compact, friendly downtown , start at the central State Capitol at Jefferson Street and Capitol Boulevard. This squat replica of the national capitol exhibits gemstones such as the star garnet, found only in Indo-China and Idaho. Old Boise Historic District, nearby, is an elegant area of brick houses, shops and restaurants that has undergone major restoration. The unusual Idaho Basque Museum and Cultural Center at 607-611 Grove St is located in a former boarding house that was for many years home to Basque immigrants fresh from the western Pyrenees, who came to central Idaho, with its equally mountainous terrain, to employ their shepherding skills. The museum traces the Basque cultural heritage and hosts regular traditional dance nights.

It's impossible not to be impressed by the contrast between the urban greenery and the humpy desert hills all around. The city is rightly proud of the Greenbelt, some nineteen miles of paths that crisscross the tranquil Boise River to link nine separate parks. In Julia Davis Park, the Idaho Historical Museum chronicles Native American and Basque history, as well as the experience of the Chinese miners of the 1870s and 1880s, who picked over mines long since abandoned by whites. The state legislature, controlled by unreconstructed Confederates who had fled the South after the Civil War, did nothing to stamp out racial violence, and forced the Chinese to pay $4 a month, a considerable amount at the time, just to live in the Territory.

The Old Idaho Penitentiary nestles beneath desert hills at 2445 Old Penitentiary Rd, off Warm Springs Avenue. This imposing sandstone-walled citadel feels like a desolate outpost, despite being just a mile from downtown. Constructed in 1870 to hold robbers, rustlers and other desperadoes, it remained open until 1974. Self-guided tours take you through the cramped solitary confinement unit, and the gallows room where the last hanging in Idaho was carried out in 1957. Restoration work has sensibly avoided trying to make this brutal prison look more palatable. A small museum displays confiscated weapons and mugshots of former inmates, including one Harry Orchard, who blew up the state governor in 1905 and served out his sentence here, dying in 1954 at the age of 88. Oddly adjacent to the penitentiary, the Idaho Botanical Gardens has nine themed gardens.