Nashville's 7 Best Guided Tours

While perhaps a more straightforward tour, Echoes of Nashville promises to guide visitors through the city’s rich history. This tour starts on Lower Broadway and takes its participants on a mile-and-a-half walk through many of the city’s most historically significant landmarks, including the Tennessee State Capitol and the Ryman Auditorium.

To book: call +1 (615) 576-0804, or email tours@echoesofnashville.com.

Looking for a guided walking tour of Nashville with a unique focus? Explore Crawls offers various specialized “crawls,” or tours, that promise to simultaneously educate and entertain. Their most popular crawl is an Instagram scavenger hunt, during which participants compete against each other through a series of tasks — prizes included!

To book: visit their website or call + 1 (615) 640-0658.

For a slightly more active and adventurous tour of Nashville, Green Fleet Bicycle Shop offers a variety of bicycle tours through different parts of the city. Tours include the Signature City Tour, which takes participants on an 8- to 10-mile trek through some of the city’s more off-the-beaten-path neighborhoods (including Germantown and Marathon Village) and the slightly longer Bike the Line: Stories of Music Row tour, which guides participants through the history of Nashville’s renowned Music Row (snack and drink included).

To book: visit their website.

Some tours guide participants on foot, others by bicycle or trolley. If you take a tour from iRide Nashville, however, you will explore the city in a truly unique style: by segway. iRide offers two different guided segway tours through Music City — a Downtown Tour, which stops at landmarks like the Schermerhorn Symphony Center and the Country Music Hall of Fame, and the All-Access Music Pass tour, in which participants do not just see but actually stop and tour three different music landmarks (the Johnny Cash Museum, the Ryman Auditorium, and the Musicians Hall of Fame).

To book: visit their website.

Nashville was rated by Zagat as one of the top ten next hot food cities. Take a tour with Walk Eat Nashville, and you’ll begin to understand why. Participants can choose from three different tours, each of which guides you through a 1.5-mile walking route with six different tasting stops. Each tour focuses on a different Nashville neighborhood (East Nashville, Midtown/Vanderbilt, and SoBro/Downtown), but all three promise to “offer a taste of the people, places and dishes making Nashville the new culinary capital of the South.”

To book: visit their website for their online booking calendar.

River Queen Voyages, founded in 2015, is Nashville’s only kayak tour and rental company. The company is devoted to providing Nashville with “more readily available ways to connect with nature,” and its guided kayak tours on the Cumberland River do just that. Participants can choose from two different tours, which vary in duration and starting point. And if the idea of an afternoon spent gliding through the river and learning about Nashville in the process isn’t enticing enough, the view of the Nashville skyline at the end of River Queen’s downtown route was voted “Best View of the City” in 2015.

To book: visit their website.

Tennessee Whiskey: the title of both a chart-topping country song and a one-of-a-kind tour of Nashville. On a Tennessee Whiskey Tour, education is not just a goal but an added benefit, as participants are shuttled to various whiskey distilleries in order to get an in-depth understanding of whiskey distillation and its history in Tennessee (it was, after all, the first state to pass a Prohibition law). And, of course, whiskey tasting is included in the tour.

To book: visit their website.