Start from 86 curated places around Bristol, GB, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
Wilsons
A small Montpelier dining room where most of the produce comes from the kitchen's own smallholding outside the city, so the menu rewrites itself constantly. It is the kind of seasonal cooking that reads simple on paper and lands as the best meal of a trip. This is the special-occasion booking of the stay.
COR
A small, warm Bedminster room doing Mediterranean small plates with a Spanish backbone from a chef who cut his teeth at Bravas and Gambas. It carries a Bib Gourmand and pours some of the better cocktails in south Bristol. Good for a long, unhurried dinner where you keep ordering one more plate.
Trails & outdoors
Bristol Harbourside Walk
A flat, paved loop around the Floating Harbour taking in the SS Great Britain, M Shed, the waterside bars and the cobbled quaysides. It is the city's easiest orientation walk, threading most of the harbour sights together. Good for a gentle first afternoon or an evening stroll.
Clifton Downs
A vast open expanse of grass and avenues above the gorge, split into Clifton and Durdham Downs, with the suspension bridge and observatory along its edge. Routes here are flat, easy and as long as you make them. The default local spot for a clear-headed walk or run.
Things to do
M Shed
A free museum in a 1950s dockside cargo shed telling the story of Bristol and its people, from slavery and protest to music and trade. It is opinionated and local in a way few city museums manage, with one of the toppled Colston statue exhibits among the talking points. A solid rainy-day half-day on the harbour.
Bristol Museum & Art Gallery
A grand free museum near the university mixing Egyptology, natural history, local archaeology and a strong art collection, all under an Edwardian Baroque roof. It is sprawling and a little old-fashioned in the best way. A reliable wet-weather option with kids or without.
Landmarks & sights
Clifton Suspension Bridge
Brunel's bridge across the Avon Gorge is the city's defining image, a 19th-century engineering feat slung high above the river. Walking across it is free and the gorge drops away dramatically on either side. The one sight everyone visiting Bristol should tick off.
Brunel's SS Great Britain
The world's first iron-hulled, screw-propeller ocean liner, now restored in the dry dock where she was built on the harbourside. You walk the decks and the engine room and can stand under the hull in a glass-roofed dry dock. The harbour's anchor attraction and easily a half-day.