Discover South Bend and Find Hotels

South Bend combines outdoor activities with museums and a zoo. If you’re looking for a hotel in the city, you can start planning your stay around the things that interest you: woods and trails, activities by the water, art, or the region’s history. These different highlights offer concrete starting points for planning your trip.

Nature and Trails at Rum Village

Rum Village offers hiking trails, bike paths, and picnic areas. This gives you several ways to spend time outdoors: you can plan a hike or bike ride, or make use of the picnic areas. The hilly woodlands of the Rum Village Nature Center cover 160 hectares. They are home to deer, foxes, reptiles, amphibians, and numerous bird species. The nature offerings have distinct focuses: Rum Village highlights trails and picnic areas, while the Nature Center showcases the woodland landscape and its wildlife.

Activities by the Water and Seasonal Ice Skating

The East Race Waterway is in downtown South Bend and features Class 2 whitewater rapids. More than five miles of paved, lighted walking and running trails follow its banks along the scenic St. Joseph River. Whitewater and riverside trails offer different ways to get active here.

Howard Park adds seasonal ice activities to the mix. The park has a 16,000-square-foot skating trail and an ice pond for ice skating and broomball. If you’d like to include ice skating in your trip plans, check in advance whether it’s available during your travel dates.

Automotive History, Art, and the Region’s Past

The Studebaker National Museum’s approximately 120 vehicles span 150 years of automotive history that unfolded entirely in South Bend, Indiana. Its collection also includes one of the largest collections of presidential carriages in the United States. Among them is the carriage that took President Lincoln to Ford’s Theatre on the evening of his assassination. The automotive history and presidential carriages give the museum two clearly distinct historical focuses.

The South Bend Museum of Art presents more than 15 exhibitions each year and maintains a permanent collection of over 1,200 works of art. At the History Museum, seven rooms with dioramas and interactive displays explain the development of the St. Joseph River Valley: from dense woodland through French exploration to a major industrial center of the Midwest. In South Bend, you can choose between art, automotive history, and a broader account of the valley’s history.

Get Up Close to Animals

The Potawatomi Zoo is Indiana’s first zoo and is home to more than 400 animals. Visitors can see animals up close, meet them, and talk with zookeepers. Alongside the woodlands at the Nature Center, this offers another way to explore wildlife: here, through encounters with zoo animals and conversations with their keepers.

Discover more destinations: Indian Village, Mishawaka, Granger.

Go to the main travel overview: St. Joseph.