Start from 35 curated places around Ashland, OR, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
MÄS
A 16-seat tasting-menu counter tucked off an alley, cooking seafood-forward Cascadian food built on foraged and local ingredients. The chef has been a James Beard finalist and the room earned national attention, so this is the special-occasion seat in town.
Larks Home Kitchen Cuisine
The farm-to-table dining room inside the historic Ashland Springs Hotel, doing French-influenced Pacific Northwest plates with produce from local growers. It is a reliable nicer dinner before a show without tipping into stiff formality.
Trails & outdoors
Lithia Park Loop
The flat, shaded two-mile loop that follows Ashland Creek up through Lithia Park and back. It is the easy walk everyone does, accessible straight from the plaza, with the duck ponds and Japanese garden along the way.
White Rabbit Trail
A moderate woodland climb in the hills above town, passing granite boulders to ridge views over the Rogue Valley, Emigrant Lake, and Grizzly Peak. It is part of the Ashland trail network that starts close to the edge of town.
Things to do
Oregon Shakespeare Festival
The repertory theater company that put Ashland on the map, running a long season of Shakespeare, classics, and new work across three stages including an outdoor Elizabethan theater. It is the reason most visitors come, and a season can mean a different play every night.
Oregon Cabaret Theatre
An intimate dinner-theater in a restored 1911 church a block off the plaza, staging musicals and comedies with food and drink served at your table. It is the lighter, more relaxed evening counterpoint to the big festival next door.
Landmarks & sights
Lithia Park
A 93-acre ribbon of forested canyon that climbs from the downtown plaza along Ashland Creek, built on the site of an old mill. Locals come for the Japanese garden, the two duck ponds, and the band shell that hosts free summer concerts, and it is the green heart that ties the whole town together.
Schneider Museum of Art
The contemporary art museum on the Southern Oregon University campus, with rotating exhibitions that lean toward living regional and national artists rather than a permanent collection. Admission is free, and the shows turn over every couple of months, so it rewards a quick repeat visit.