And then there is the land itself. Palo Duro Canyon — the second-largest canyon in the United States, carved by a fork of the Red River into 800-foot walls of layered red and gold — opens up about 25 miles southeast, with the Lighthouse Rock formation as its signature and rim-to-floor trails for hikers and campers. West of town on the old Route 66 alignment stands Cadillac Ranch, the 1974 installation by the art collective Ant Farm: ten Cadillacs buried nose-down in a wheat field, repainted daily by visitors, as pure a piece of American roadside art as exists anywhere.
The city itself arrived with the Fort Worth & Denver City Railway in 1887. A tent camp on the right-of-way grew into a townsite platted by J.T. Berry beside Amarillo Lake — called Wild Horse Lake by the cowboys — and on August 30, 1887 it won the Potter County seat election. Two years later, after flooding soaked the low ground, Henry B. Sanborn — partner of barbed-wire magnate Joseph F. Glidden and remembered as the Father of Amarillo — moved the town to higher ground, and the boom began: by the 1890s Amarillo was shipping more cattle than any point on the planet, over 100,000 head a year.
Why People Visit Amarillo Texas
Amarillo draws visitors with a mix of Western heritage, natural wonder, and Mother Road Americana. Travelers find it both a marquee stop along historic Route 66 and the gateway to Palo Duro Canyon, with deep cattle-ranching and Quarter-Horse traditions and the wide, plainspoken character of the high plains. It is proud, practical, and unmistakably Texan.
