The city’s front yard

Noteworthy for: Grant and Millenium Park's provide a much needed burst of greenery to downtown Chicago and, with Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate, provides the city with one of its best loved new monuments.

Talk of the town: Much of these parks' green area was actually reclaimed from Lake Michigan.

Grant Park is downtown Chicago’s respiratory system: a verdant, 319-acre strip on the lakefront that provides welcome green space among the skyscrapers.

At the park's North End is Millennium Park, dominated by Anish Kapoor's beautiful reflective sculpture Cloud Gate, known affectionately as ‘The Bean’. This small skyscraper-lined mini-park gives way further south to wider expanses of lush-green lawns, baseball diamonds and flower-lined paths. Finally, the park ends at Chicago's densest cluster of cultural institutions, the Museum Campus, which contains visitors will find the Field Museum and Adler Planetarium among others.

Great for a wander or a break from downtown's high-rise density, the park can also be lively by night in summertime, with Millennium Park a popular venue for open air concerts.