Four days in Seattle: a city with a volcano on the skyline and salmon in the traffic

Everything today is inside eight downtown blocks, most of them downhill from each other. Start at the market, which is the thing every visitor does and is still worth doing, provided you go early.

Pike Place opened in 1907 to let farmers sell directly to the public and it never stopped being a working market. Before ten in the morning it is fishmongers, flower sellers and produce. After eleven it is a queue. Go down through the lower levels, which most people never find, and out onto the terraces above the waterfront.

The art museum is three blocks away and is a good middle-sized collection: strong on Northwest Coast Native art, a room of Chinese and Japanese porcelain, and temporary shows that carry the rest. Two hours.

Finish at the central library, which sounds like an odd recommendation until you see it. Rem Koolhaas built it in 2004 as a stack of glass boxes at different angles, and the book spiral runs continuously up four floors in a single sequence so that no collection ever has to be broken across a staircase. The tenth floor reading room looks out over the sound. It is free and it takes twenty minutes.

The 1962 World's Fair left the city a monorail, a needle and a large site full of institutions, and all of it is fifteen minutes north of downtown.

The Space Needle is 605 feet and was built for that fair. The observation deck was rebuilt a few years ago with floor-to-ceiling glass and a rotating glass floor a level below, which is more unsettling than it sounds. Book a timed slot, and if the forecast offers you one clear day out of your four, spend it here.

Next door, the Museum of Pop Culture is in a crumpled Frank Gehry building that people either love or describe unkindly, and inside it is much better than the exterior suggests: Hendrix and Nirvana, both local, plus serious permanent exhibitions on science fiction and horror. Two hours.

Then walk up Queen Anne hill in the late afternoon for Kerry Park, which is a small ledge of a park on a residential street and is where every photograph of this city is taken from. Downtown in the middle, the Needle in front of it, the sound behind, and Rainier over the top if the day is being generous. Go for the last hour of light.

North of the centre, where the city works. Today follows the ship canal that was cut in 1917 to join the lakes to the sea, which is the single piece of engineering that made modern Seattle possible.

Start at the western end. The locks lower boats twenty-two feet from fresh water to salt using nothing but gravity, and they are free to walk around, busy with everything from kayaks to fishing boats, and open every day. Alongside them is a fish ladder with a viewing gallery below the waterline, where in summer you can stand and watch salmon climbing through a window a foot from your face.

Ballard, the neighbourhood above, was a separate town of Scandinavian fishing families before Seattle annexed it, and the museum there tells that story properly across a thousand years of Nordic emigration. Lunch on Ballard Avenue afterwards, which is a preserved nineteenth century street full of good restaurants.

Then follow the canal east to Gas Works Park, which is the most Seattle thing in Seattle: a coal gasification plant that closed in 1956, left standing, painted, and turned into a public park with a grass hill next to it. Climb the hill. The whole downtown skyline sits across the lake with seaplanes landing in front of it.

The last morning goes south, which is convenient because the airport is that way.

Start at the Smith Tower, in the old brick blocks at the bottom of the hill, which was the first skyscraper in the city when it went up in 1914 and the tallest building west of the Mississippi for decades afterwards. The lifts are the original copper and brass ones and are still worked by an attendant, which is now a rare enough thing to be the point. The observatory on the 35th floor has a bar in it.

Then out to the Museum of Flight, which is at Boeing Field between the city and the airport and is one of the best aviation collections anywhere. Over a hundred aircraft, an original Boeing factory building from 1909, the first jet Air Force One, a Concorde and a space shuttle trainer you can walk through. Three hours, and children will want four.

Sea-Tac is twenty minutes further south from there, which makes this a very easy last day with luggage in the boot of a taxi.