🇺🇸 United States · The South / Southeast
Dallas is one of the great metropolises of Texas and the heart of the enormous Dallas-Fort Worth conurbation, the fourth most populated in the United States. Born as a rail and trade hub on the prairies of north Texas, today it is a modern, prosperous city, with a gleaming skyline, a diversified economy (banking, technology, telecommunications, energy) and a Texan pride you can feel on every corner.
For the traveler, Dallas combines history, culture and entertainment. It is inevitably known the world over for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, an event remembered today in the sober and moving Sixth Floor Museum, on Dealey Plaza. But the city is much more: a vibrant Arts District (the largest in the country), neighborhoods like Deep Ellum with its live music, the historic West End and a food scene where Tex-Mex and barbecue are religion.
This guide walks you through the essentials of Dallas with a practical eye: the sites tied to the memory of JFK, the great museums of the Arts District, the parks and viewpoints, the nightlife of Deep Ellum, where to eat barbecue and Tex-Mex, and how to get around a city built for the car but with a core that is perfectly walkable and well served by light rail.
Founded in 1841 by John Neely Bryan on the banks of the Trinity River, Dallas grew as a meeting point of trade routes and, above all, thanks to the railroad, which turned it into a great cotton and trading center. Oil and banking transformed it in the 20th century into a financial metropolis. On 22 November 1963, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Dealey Plaza marked its history and its image worldwide forever. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The 'Lone Star State': Comanche and Apache land, Spanish mission, independent republic after the Alamo, giant of oil and of space, with an identity as big as its vast territory.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
At 12:30 on 22 November 1963, three shots in a plaza in downtown Dallas changed the course of United States history and sealed this city's name in the world's memory forever. But long before being 'the city that killed Kennedy', Dallas was already an improbable story: a great metropolis raised in the middle of a dry prairie, with no port, no mountains, no oil beneath its feet, which grew rich simply by sitting at the crossing of the right roads.
Dallas was founded in 1841 by the lawyer and merchant John Neely Bryan, who set up a trading post at a ford on the Trinity River, on the prairies of north Texas, then part of the short-lived Republic of Texas. The origin of the name 'Dallas' is not entirely clear: the most accepted hypothesis links it to George Mifflin Dallas, vice president of the United States at the time, although other versions point to different members of the Dallas family.
During its first decades, Dallas was a modest agricultural and trading center. The great leap came in the 1870s with the arrival of the railroad: the crossing of the Houston and Texas Central (north-south) and Texas and Pacific (east-west) lines turned Dallas into a strategic rail hub. That made it an important market for cotton, grain and cattle, and drew commerce, banks and industry.
By the end of the 19th century, Dallas was already a prosperous commercial city. Its location, without great natural resources of its own, meant its wealth was based on trade, finance and services, a trait that has marked its character to this day: a city born of commerce and connection rather than of heavy industry.
The 20th century consolidated Dallas as an economic power of the Southwest. Although the city itself did not sit on oil fields, the discovery of enormous oil fields in east Texas in the 1930s (the East Texas Oil Field, one of the largest in the world at the time) turned Dallas into the financial and administrative center of the region's oil industry. Dallas banks and insurers financed the drilling, and the city grew strongly.
Dallas became an important banking, insurance and commercial center. In 1936 it hosted the Texas Centennial Exposition at Fair Park, a group of art deco buildings that still stands and is a National Historic Landmark. The city developed its characteristic skyline of skyscrapers and became home to major corporations.
After the Second World War, Dallas kept expanding alongside neighboring Fort Worth, forming one of the largest metropolitan areas in the country. The opening in 1974 of the enormous Dallas/Fort Worth airport (DFW) reinforced its role as a great air and logistics hub. Today its economy is diversified: technology, telecommunications, banking, defense and trade, with numerous Fortune 500 corporate headquarters.
The event that marked the history of Dallas forever and projected it to the whole world was the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on 22 November 1963. That midday, the presidential motorcade was crossing downtown Dallas in an open-top car when, as it passed Dealey Plaza, in front of the Texas School Book Depository, several shots rang out. President Kennedy was hit and died shortly afterwards at Parkland hospital.
The official investigations, led by the Warren Commission, concluded that the shots were fired by Lee Harvey Oswald, from a window on the sixth floor of the Depository. Oswald was arrested a few hours later, but two days afterwards, while being transferred, he was himself killed by Jack Ruby in front of the television cameras, which fed countless theories and doubts about what happened for decades.
The assassination turned Dallas, for a long time, into 'the city that killed Kennedy', a shadow it took years to shake off. The shock was enormous: for the first time, millions of people followed a national tragedy unfolding live on television, including Oswald's own killing at Ruby's hands two days later, broadcast live. Over time, the city took on that memory thoughtfully: in 1989 the Sixth Floor Museum opened, in the Depository building itself, and Dealey Plaza, with its memorial cenotaph designed by Philip Johnson and the X marking the spot of the shot, became a place of historical pilgrimage.
The case never stopped generating debate. The gradual declassification of the federal files on the assassination —a process that stretched over decades and has continued releasing documents in recent years— kept public fascination alive and fed conspiracy theories. Whatever the interpretation, the JFK assassination remains one of the most studied, filmed and debated episodes of the 20th century, and Dealey Plaza one of the few places in the world where an instant of a few seconds was recorded, analyzed and argued over frame by frame.
After the shadow of the assassination, Dallas went through decades of strong growth and of reinventing its image. In the 1970s and 1980s, the city became a symbol of the prosperity and opulence of the oil South thanks, in part, to the hugely popular television series 'Dallas' (1978-1991), whose saga of the Ewing family and their Southfork ranch carried the city's name around the planet and fixed the image of the Texan oil tycoon in the popular imagination.
Sport holds a central place in the city's identity. The Dallas Cowboys, the football team, are one of the most valuable and most followed franchises in the world, nicknamed 'America's Team', with several Super Bowl titles and a futuristic stadium (AT&T Stadium, in Arlington). Alongside them are the NBA's Dallas Mavericks —champions in 2011—, the Texas Rangers in baseball and the Dallas Stars in hockey, which make the metropolis a sporting powerhouse.
In recent decades, Dallas has bet heavily on culture and urban regeneration: the Arts District, the largest in the country, with museums and halls signed by prestigious architects; Klyde Warren Park, built over a freeway; and the revitalization of neighborhoods like Deep Ellum. The Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area is today one of the fastest growing in the United States, a dynamic region that attracts companies, technology and people, while keeping that unmistakable Texan pride that defines its character.