Just half an hour's drive east of Atlanta, Stone Mountain State Park (park daily 6am-midnight; attractions daily spring & summer 10am-9pm, rest of year 10am-5pm; $6 per vehicle) centers around a huge dome of granite with a five-mile circumference. You can climb it in around 45 minutes, or take a cable car to the top, and there are various train rides and so on, but most visitors come to see the massive 90ft by 190ft relief of Confederates Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Work on the colossal sculpture was started in 1924 by Gutzon Borglum, who went on to carve Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, but was not completed until 1970. Concessions and giftshops down below supply endless souvenir kitsch, and the nightly lasershow in summer culminates with Elvis's gut-wrenching rendition of Dixie (9.30pm; free with entrance to park).

Colossal Sculpture - 1924

WEST END

The West End , Atlanta's oldest quarter, dating from 1835, is a slightly shabby but slowly reviving district southwest of downtown. Historically a black residential area, it remains so today: a buzzy, more upbeat counterpoint to Sweet Auburn. Georgia's only museum dedicated to African-American and Haitian art is displayed at the Hammonds House , 503 Peeples St (Tues-Fri 10am-6pm, Sat & Sun 1-5pm; $2), and you can tour the 1910 Beaux Arts Herndon Home , 587 University Place (Tues-Sat 10am-4.30pm; $5), designed and lived in by Alonzo Herndon, the freed slave who became a barber, founded the Atlanta Life Insurance Company and went on to be the city's first black millionaire. Together with his wife (the director of Atlanta University's drama department), and such black luminaries as W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, he participated in setting up progressive black institutions. The mansion's grand interior, built and crafted by black artisans, contains the family's original furnishings, including some fine Venetian glass.

The fascinating Wren's Nest , home of Br'er Rabbit author Joel Chandler Harris, at 1050 R.D. Abernathy Blvd (Tues-Sat 10am-4pm, Sun 1-4pm; $3), skewers preconceptions about the Uncle Remus stories propagated by the racist images of Disney's Song of the South . Harris, a friend of Mark Twain, was a respected journalist whose column for the Atlanta Constitution retold the slave stories he had heard while training as a printer on a plantation newspaper; recently the dialect has been reappraised as authentically African and the stories as valuable affirmation of a black folk tradition. Regular storytelling sessions take place in the peaceful, untamed garden.