Gatlinburg Travel Guide

Most people either love Gatlinburg or they hate it - or both.  Thousands - perhaps millions - of people visit this little mountain town once or several times a year and think it is the neatest place in the world. Often first time visitors, who expected to find a quaint little out-of-the-way mountain village, arrive in Gatlinburg and are shocked by the congested glare. Gatlinburg is literally within footsteps of the most visited National Park in the United States, The Great Smoky Mountains, and has been in a non-stop boom ever since the formation of the Park, in the 1930s. However, expansion of the town is severely limited by the mountains and surrounding parkland. Not to be deterred, developers just keep tearing down old structures and building bigger and better ones. First the development was to provide accomodations and sell hand-made mountain crafts to visitors to the park. Today, sad to say, many people come for the tourist attractions of Gatlinburg and never give the Park a second look.

  You'll find almost limitless attractions here:  museums, miniature golf, skylifts, amusement rides, musical revues and the most visited aquarium in the United States, to name just a few.   There are dozens of motels, hotels and campgrounds to accomodate the tourists, and more restaurants than you could possibly sample in a month of vacations.  Also, with more than 30 wedding chapels in Gatlinburg and Sevier County, it is second only to Las Vegas as a wedding destination.

Gatlinburg is definitely NOT your typical Appalachian village. It is a small town of just over 3,000 population that draws up to 10 million visitors a year - most of them en-route to the Smokies. Take Gatlinburg on its own terms. Enjoy the restaurants, museums, amusements, fudge, and entertainment - knowing that whenever the clamor gets to be too much, you can easily escape into the serene fastness of Eastern America's greatest wilderness area.