America’s smallest biggest city is surprisingly wild

With a population of nearly 45,000 people, Burlington may be Vermont’s biggest city — but it’s still the smallest top population center of any US state. For travelers, it’s a chance for an urban escape that still offers easy access to nature and a small-town experience.

“You get this feeling of, ‘Here is this place where people care a lot,’” said Christine Tyler Hill, a crossing guard and artist who lives and works in Burlington’s Old North End neighborhood.

It’s a close-knit community, where civic engagement runs deep. As a crossing guard, Hill spends weekday mornings helping pedestrians, including Progressive mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak.

“Six degrees of separation? In Burlington it’s two degrees,” said Hill, whose hand-printed newsletter about daily life in the city, The Cloud Report, went viral on TikTok earlier this year.

Tapping into that small-city spirit is a great way to kick off a visit to Burlington — whether you’re browsing produce and crafts at the weekly Burlington Farmers Market; sipping your way through the Vermont Brewers Festival in July; or strolling September’s Art Hop, a weekend-long event featuring open studios, music and more.

Wherever you go, you’ll see plenty of students. Founded by European settlers in the 1770s, Burlington has been a college town since 1791, when Revolutionary leader Ira Allen established the University of Vermont — and the annual influx of undergraduates still energizes the city’s cultural scene.

Many can be seen popping into shops and cafes in the city’s pedestrian-only shopping and dining street downtown, where tables spill across sidewalks in warm months.

If Burlington has a quirky reputation and leftist sensibilities today, that wasn’t always the case. By the early 19^th century, Burlington was a major shipping and lumber port, its Lake Champlain wharves laden with goods. Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, a wave of back-to-the-landers and countercultural youth flooded into Vermont from around the United States, with a lasting impact on Burlington’s politics and personality.

“A lot of what makes Burlington special now is all the things that crazy hippies did decades ago,” Hill said.

The wild side of a quiet city

Some might argue one of those “crazy hippies” was Bernie Sanders, who moved to Vermont in 1968 and won Burlington’s mayoral election on a socialist platform in 1981.

Long before Americans came to know Sanders as the mitten-wearing Senator railing against oligarchy, his tenure as mayor transformed Burlington — including by making a derelict stretch of formerly industrial Lake Champlain shoreline into the 45-acre Waterfront Park that now offers some of the city’s most accessible nature.

On sunny days, the lakefront fills with boats from the Community Sailing Center and the Whistling Man Schooner Co. Families with children head to experiential science and nature museum ECHO, Leahy Center for Lake Champlain, where visitors can see native species like spotted turtles and bullfrogs, or hear the legend of Champ — a (maybe) mythical monster believed by some to live in the lake, and the mascot of the city’s collegiate baseball team.

The Waterfront Park is also the main access point for cyclists and pedestrians using the paved Burlington Greenway, which runs for eight miles along the shore of New England’s biggest lake.

To the north, the route continues on an elevated causeway across Lake Champlain, with wraparound views of the Green Mountains and New York’s Adirondacks. From there, a small bicycle ferry organized by cycling nonprofit Local Motion shuttles cyclists to the island of South Hero, which with its vineyards, orchards and lakeside lodging is a longtime destination for summer vacationers.

Heading south from the Burlington Waterfront, you’ll pass Burlington Surf Club — a watersports hub launching week-long “learn to wing foil” camps this summer, using inflatable wings to propel boards with hydrofoils — as well as low-key parks and the pop-up sauna SAVU Lakeside.

And the greenway is just the start of urban adventuring in a city that has an extraordinary 50% open space.

“There are just fantastic natural places,” said Zoe Richards, director of Burlington Wildways, a coalition that helps care for them. Last fall saw the debut of the Burlington Bike Park, whose three trails feature beginner-friendly mountain bike terrain. Once temperatures drop, the city maintains a cattail-fringed pond in Arthur Park for wild ice skating; skaters twirl, play hockey and follow fox and otter tracks through the snow.

Geography lends the city a biodiversity boost, Richards said. “Burlington is a peninsula, really — between the Winooski River to the east and Lake Champlain to the west,” she said. She’s spotted moose wandering Burlington streets, and beavers swimming the riverfront. In the winter, downtown becomes a giant roost for thousands of crows. “It’s a spectacular phenomenon,” she said. “You just see a river of crows coming in.”

Earlier this year, the coalition put finishing touches on the 9.5-mile Burlington Wildways Trail that offers visitors a chance to explore some of the city’s most important ecosystems, from floodplain forests to a sandy beach . “It really gives you a feel for the city, and what’s so remarkable about it,” she said.

From Phish Food to hyper-local cuisine

To foster such a thoughtful approach to the urban and the wild, you need a certain kind of leadership, and not only from the political class.

As Sanders was launching his political career, two other Vermont idealists — Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield — opened the first Ben & Jerry’s scoop shop in a dilapidated Burlington gas station in 1978. (The current Burlington Ben & Jerry’s is on pedestrian-only Church Street; the ice cream factory, which offers popular tours, is 30 minutes away in Waterbury.)

Back in the ‘70s the food scene was uninspired, recalled Cohen. “All Wonder Bread,” he said.

Ben & Jerry’s, now a billion-dollar business, helped put Vermont flavors and an all-natural ethos on the map for outsiders. (One of the company’s most popular ice cream varieties, Phish Food, is named for the rock band founded on the University of Vermont campus.) The ensuing decades saw Burlington’s culinary scene grow ambitious. Even the bread got good, Cohen said.

“We’ve got four or five really excellent bakeries — like August First,” Cohen said, naming a downtown standby for baked goods and all-day breakfast that bans laptop computers to encourage socializing.

One of Cohen’s favorites is Restaurant Poco, with its sharing plates and international fare. It’s “really small, really local, and really independent,” he said. He also frequents Frankie’s, which opened in 2024 and offers pithy, seasonal menus using many Vermont ingredients — though the grilled swordfish is a standby.

One locally beloved spot does double-duty: By day, the dining room at 88 Oak St. is the counter-service sandwich shop Poppy Cafe, serving creative sandwiches like prosciutto and hot pepper jelly. At night — and under a different owner — the teensy space turns into Fancy’s Restaurant and offers intimate dinners of small plates such as a whipped-feta appetizer with feathery focaccia that wins raves.

Farm-to-table dining has long been big in Vermont, which has more organically farmed land per capita than any other US state.

“People are really trying to highlight local products,” said Cara Tobin, chef-owner of Honey Road Restaurant, a special-occasion spot specializing in dishes inspired by eastern Mediterranean cuisines.

Tobin adapts those faraway flavors to northern New England crops — like a tahini-dressed kale salad using greens from area growers. Along with many local chefs, she also sources fresh produce from The Intervale, a 360-acre patchwork of organic farms, community gardens and forest that’s under two miles from downtown.

“Having farms that are right there in the city is pretty incredible,” said Tobin. Order one of her intensely flavorful dips — like pickle tzatziki or tahini hummus — and it might come alongside a pile of bright-pink radishes from the Intervale’s 22-acre Pitchfork Farm.

It’s an idyllic spot. A short stroll away from its vegetable fields winds the Winooski River, a critical wildlife corridor. On the banks, ostrich ferns grow waist-high in summer.

Among the ferns, and curving away downstream, you might spot the slender dirt path of the Wildways Trail.

Next town: Juneau, Alaska is No. 7

A wild capital city that’s small by population but massive in nature