🇺🇸 United States · Alaska
Anchorage is the urban face of Alaska: a modern, comfortable city set in wild scenery that is hard to match. It holds almost four out of every ten residents of the state and brings together an international airport, museums, hotels and restaurants, while being literally surrounded by the fiercest nature. From downtown you can see the Chugach Mountains, moose walk through its city parks and, on occasion, even bears; and within minutes glaciers, fjords and forests begin.
More than a destination in itself, Anchorage is the great base of operations for discovering Alaska. From here run the Alaska Railroad and the routes toward the Kenai Peninsula, Seward and its glacier fjords, toward Talkeetna and Denali National Park, or toward the Portage Glacier and the mountain town of Girdwood. The city works as a starting point for fishing trips, wildlife watching, kayaking among the ice and scenic flights over Denali.
This guide brings together the essentials with real figures: what to see in the city and its immediate surroundings, how to get around and how to arrive, which trips are worth it, where to sleep and eat, and when to go. Anchorage combines the comfort of a city with the promise of adventure around the corner: the perfect place to start (or finish) a trip through Alaska.
The Cook Inlet region was for millennia home to the Dena'ina people, of the Athabascan family, who lived on salmon fishing, hunting and gathering. The inlet's name recalls the British captain James Cook, who explored these waters in 1778 in search of the Northwest Passage. Anchorage as a city is very young: it was born in 1915 as a camp for workers on the railroad the government was building between Seward and the Alaskan interior. The port, the railroad and later aviation drove its growth, which accelerated with the Second World War and the establishment of large military bases. The brutal Good Friday earthquake of 1964 (magnitude 9.2, the strongest ever recorded in North America) devastated part of the city, which was rebuilt. The discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay and the trans-Alaska pipeline, in the 1970s, brought an era of prosperity that made Anchorage the state's economic engine. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The 'Last Frontier': the largest and wildest state in the country, land of the Iñupiat, Yup'ik, Aleuts and Tlingit, bought from Russia in 1867, forged by the gold rushes and by oil, crowned by Denali —the highest peak in North America—.
Read the history of Alaska →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
For the largest city in Alaska, Anchorage is surprisingly young: in 1915 it was no more than a tent camp beside a creek. But the human history of this land is told in millennia, not decades. Long before the city existed, the Cook Inlet region was the territory of the Dena'ina people, of the great Athabascan family. For thousands of years, the Dena'ina lived off the area's extraordinary resources: the great salmon runs that came up the rivers, hunting moose and other animals, gathering berries and fishing in the inlet. They had seasonal settlements and a deep knowledge of the land, the tides and the cycles of nature.
Cook Inlet is remarkable for its extreme tides, among the largest in North America, which can exceed 9 meters in range and generate dangerous currents and mudflats. That demanding environment shaped the life of the Dena'ina, expert navigators and fishers.
The inlet's name comes from the British captain James Cook, who explored these waters in 1778 during his third voyage, searching without success for the Northwest Passage linking the Pacific with the Atlantic. After Cook came the Russians, who set up fur trading posts in the region during the period of Russian America, before the United States bought Alaska from Russia in 1867.
Anchorage is a surprisingly young city: it was born in 1915, tied to the building of a railroad. In those years, the federal government of the United States decided to build the Alaska Railroad to connect the port of Seward, on the coast, with the interior of the territory and its coal and gold deposits. On the banks of Ship Creek, on Cook Inlet, a workers' camp was set up as the headquarters of the project.
That camp grew fast: within a few months it went from a handful of tents to a population of thousands. In 1915 the city was laid out and platted on a bluff above the creek, and the name 'Anchorage' was chosen, for the area's natural anchorage. The arrival of the railroad, completed in 1923, cemented Anchorage as a transport hub.
Through its first decades, Anchorage was a relatively small town, dependent on the railroad and on trade. The great leap would come with aviation and, above all, with the Second World War, which would change the scale of the city forever.
The Second World War transformed Anchorage. Alaska's strategic position, facing the North Pacific and close to Asia, led the United States to build large military installations: Elmendorf Air Force Base and Fort Richardson (today combined as Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson) made the city a first-rank military center. The population shot up and the economy became militarized.
Aviation added another layer of importance: because of its location, Anchorage became a key stop on the polar air routes between North America, Europe and Asia, which drove its international airport (now named after Senator Ted Stevens) as a major passenger and cargo hub.
The third great engine arrived in the 1970s with oil. The discovery of enormous reserves at Prudhoe Bay, in the Arctic, and the construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline (1974-1977) set off an economic boom. Although the wells are far away, Anchorage became the corporate, financial and logistical center of the state's oil industry, which accelerated its growth and modernization.
On 27 March 1964, Good Friday, Alaska suffered the strongest earthquake ever recorded in North America and the second largest in world history since modern seismography began: a magnitude of 9.2 that shook the south-central part of the state for about four and a half minutes, an eternity for a quake. Anchorage, close to the epicenter, was hit hard.
The quake set off devastating landslides. The residential neighborhood of Turnagain Heights slid toward the inlet when the ground gave way, destroying whole houses; downtown, ground failure damaged or flattened some 30 blocks, with streets split open and buildings collapsed (the famous photo of Fourth Avenue dropped away dates from that day). The deadliest part, though, was not the shaking but the water: the tsunamis generated by the earthquake —which caused close to 70% of the fatalities— swept coastal Alaskan settlements minutes later. In all, the disaster left around 131 dead, a relatively low figure thanks to the state's sparse population, but with enormous material damage.
Rebuilding was long but also an opportunity: the city rose again with new construction standards, and the event drove enormous advances in the science of earthquakes and in the study of tsunamis. Today, places such as Earthquake Park recall that catastrophe, still visible in the rippled ground where the land slid away.
Today Anchorage is, with almost 290,000 inhabitants, the largest city in Alaska and the economic, commercial and logistical heart of the state. Although it is not the political capital (Juneau is), it holds the most important international airport, the headquarters of numerous companies, hospitals, universities and most of Alaska's services. Almost four out of every ten residents of the state live in its metropolitan area.
The city combines urban comfort and wilderness like few others. It is the launching point for exploring the Kenai Peninsula, the glacier fjords, Denali and the interior, and a key hub for the tourism, fishing and oil industries. Its population is notably diverse, with one of the highest proportions of Alaska Native residents of any American city, plus Pacific Islander, Asian and Latino communities.
Today's challenges are the cost of living, dependence on the oil economy and the effects of climate change in the Arctic, which are felt strongly in Alaska. Every March, Anchorage comes alive with the ceremonial start of the Iditarod, the legendary dog sled race that crosses the state, one of its best-loved events and a symbol of the Alaskan spirit.