Start from 32 curated places around Manitou Springs, CO, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
Adam's Mountain Cafe
The best vegetarian kitchen in the Pikes Peak region, running since the 1980s on a side street just off Manitou Avenue. The menu is roughly half vegetarian and builds around globally influenced dishes — Senegalese vegetable curry, French onion soup, vegan cinnamon roll. Voted Best Vegetarian Restaurant in Colorado Springs 2024.
Savelli's
A family-owned Italian restaurant on Manitou Avenue that has been the neighborhood's reliable pizza-and-pasta anchor for over two decades. Hand-tossed pizzas, daily-made dough, house sauces, and a menu broad enough for groups with varied preferences. The patio seating along the creek is the prime spot in good weather.
Trails & outdoors
The Manitou Incline
The most famous difficult day hike in Colorado: 2,768 railroad ties climbing 2,000 vertical feet in under a mile, with grades reaching 68%. The Incline follows the abandoned bed of a 1907 funicular railway that served a water pipe up the mountain. The descent is prohibited on the steps — all hikers must use Barr Trail for the return.
Barr Trail to Barr Camp
The lower section of the Barr Trail — the route to the Pikes Peak summit — from the Manitou Springs trailhead to Barr Camp at 10,200 feet, about 6.5 miles one-way. This is how the Incline descends and how serious hikers approach Pikes Peak. The trail passes through montane and subalpine zones with consistent Pikes Peak views above treeline.
Things to do
Manitou Springs Penny Arcade
An eight-building complex on Manitou Avenue housing 400-plus coin-operated machines, some dating to the early 20th century — working Mutoscopes, penny pinball, mechanical horse-racing, skeeball, and modern arcade games. Operated continuously for over 90 years. The oldest machines are genuinely functional antiques, not museum pieces.
Garden of the Gods Visitor and Nature Center
The free interpretive center on the north edge of Garden of the Gods, with 30 exhibits covering the geology, ecology, and human history of the park. The building's west-facing window walls frame the sandstone formations at scale — useful context before walking among the rocks.
Landmarks & sights
Garden of the Gods
A 1,341-acre city park just north of Manitou Springs featuring 300-foot vertical sandstone formations — crimson, white, and buff — that rise from the valley floor with Pikes Peak as backdrop. Free public park, open year-round, maintained by Colorado Springs but functionally the front yard of Manitou. The rock formations are more dramatic up close, from within the park, than from the highway.
Manitou Mineral Springs
Eight naturally carbonated springs distributed across the town, fed by rain that percolates through Pikes Peak granite and emerges mineral-rich and fizzy along the Fountain Creek drainage. Each spring has a different mineral composition and flavor. The self-guided spring walk along Manitou Avenue and Ruxton Avenue is free.