Chattanooga was featured on Condé Nast Traveler’s Bright Ideas in Travel 2026. Read the full list of winners here.
Maclellan Island is an overgrown wilderness of pine trees, pawpaw, and rivercane in the Tennessee River, across from downtown Chattanooga, Tennessee. The mile-long dirt trail I’m traipsing along crisscrosses the 24.5-acre site, where residents include raccoons, muskrats, American robins, osprey, and cormorants. Six goats—with names like Gilligan and MacLovin’—nibble on the leaves of bush honeysuckle and English ivy, clearing some of the invasive plant species that have choked out the native flora that once flourished on the uninhabited island.
Those quick-spreading plants and erosion (both natural and human-caused) are threatening the nature sanctuary, which is losing about 0.8 acres each decade. To mitigate—and eventually correct—that loss, the Chattanooga Audubon Society, which owns the island, and a committed group of volunteers are rewilding the landscape. To invite more visitors, a renovated bunkhouse is slated to open this fall, and a botanical garden and gazebo will be constructed in the next year or so.
“You’re in the forest in the middle of downtown,” says Laura Marsh, director of development at the nonprofit. “If we lose the island, we lose archaeological history. We lose biodiversity and a habitat for wildlife and birds—and a staple in downtown Chattanooga.”
That kind of commitment to remedying, preserving, and enhancing Chattanooga’s natural assets is visible across the so-called Scenic City—and led to it being named the first National Park City in North America in April 2025. Once the country’s most polluted metropolis, the destination has transformed itself into one best known for its outdoor accessibility and recreation.
The flashy designation was awarded by the National Park City Foundation, a UK-based charity that began in 2011 to encourage metro areas around the world to become greener, wilder, and healthier. Despite the name, it’s unrelated to National Parks systems that conserve and protect landscapes, but takes inspiration from that ethos. There are currently four named National Park Cities globally—London; Adelaide, Australia’ and Breda, Netherlands; alongside Chattanooga—and 10 additional locales are actively pursuing the designation.
“National parks are obviously special places where people connect with nature, but up until now, the only types of ecosystems that didn’t have any type of protected or national park status globally were urban ecosystems in cities,” says Mark Cridge, executive director of the National Park City Foundation and London National Park City. “Cities are big, complex. They’re not pristine wilderness environments.” That can make it difficult for people to view them as natural areas worth protecting. After all, outdoor recreationists traditionally leave cities to hike, bike, climb, and fish.
That was particularly true in Chattanooga. The first train arrived in the city in 1849. In the following decades, the southern town’s railroad and manufacturing industries boomed. Unregulated textile factories, iron and steel mills, and Coca-Cola production and chemical plants spewed pollution into the air and water well into the mid-20th century. People’s handkerchiefs would come away from their foreheads stained with soot.
Ironically, the city’s position in a beautiful valley—encircled by the ridges of the Cumberland Plateau, at the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains—also led to some persistent environmental issues. The elevation differences cause temperature inversions, where the warm air traveling over the ridges traps the cooler air closer to the ground, along with the smog and pollution. In 1969, the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare declared that Chattanooga had the worst air pollution in the country, with dangerous particulate matter surpassing the federal safety level threefold. Shortly after, evening news broadcaster Walter Cronkite announced to the nation that Chattanooga was the “Dirtiest City in America.”
