Three days in Portland: a city that put a bookshop and a forest at its centre

The whole of the first day fits inside twelve of Portland's very short blocks.

Pioneer Courthouse Square is the middle of the city, a brick amphitheatre built on a demolished car park after a public campaign, with the bricks carrying the names of the people who paid for them. There is a weather machine that performs at noon, which is exactly the level of civic whimsy this place operates at.

Powell's is four blocks northwest and takes a colour-coded map to navigate: an entire city block, new and second-hand shelved together, several floors, and a rare book room upstairs. Budget an hour and expect to lose two.

In the afternoon, walk up into Chinatown for the Lan Su garden. It was built in 2000 by artisans from Suzhou, Portland's sister city, using materials shipped from China, and it is a full Ming dynasty scholar's garden compressed into one city block: a pond, covered walkways, a teahouse and a great deal of very deliberate rock. Have tea in it.

Then down to the river. The waterfront park replaced a six-lane expressway in 1974, which was the first time an American city had torn out a motorway to put a park back, and it is where everybody goes in the evening.

The whole day goes up into the west hills, ten minutes from downtown on the MAX, where four things worth the trip sit within a mile of each other.

Start with the roses. The International Rose Test Gardens sit on a terrace above the city with about ten thousand bushes in six hundred varieties, laid out as a working test garden where new cultivars are trialled. It is free, it has been here since 1917, and on a clear June morning it is the reason this is called the Rose City.

Uphill from it is the Japanese garden, which is the finest thing in Portland and one of the best outside Japan. Eight distinct gardens on a wooded hillside: a strolling pond garden, a flat garden, a sand and stone garden and a tea garden, with a view over the city from the terrace that puts Mount Hood exactly where the designer wanted it. Go slowly and stay for tea.

The arboretum is next door if the legs are willing: twelve miles of trail through a thousand species of tree, free, and the western end runs straight into the five thousand acres of city forest beyond it.

Finish at Pittock Mansion, a French Renaissance pile built in 1914 by the man who owned the newspaper, sitting a thousand feet above the city. The house is a museum and the lawn outside it is free, and the view east from that lawn at sunset takes in the whole city with Mount Hood behind it.

The last morning crosses the river to the half of Portland where people live.

Mount Tabor is an extinct volcanic cinder cone inside the city limits, which very few American cities can claim, with reservoirs cut into its flanks and a road to the top that is closed to cars on Wednesdays. The climb takes twenty minutes and the view west from the summit takes in downtown with the west hills behind it.

Come down the western side into the Hawthorne district for lunch, which is a mile of second-hand shops, record stores and food carts and is the most concentrated version of the Portland cliché you will find.

The cinema pub on that street is the thing to end on. It is a 700-seat picture palace from 1927 that shows second-run films with a beer and a pizza brought to your seat, for less than an ordinary cinema ticket costs elsewhere. If nothing is on that you want, the bar downstairs is open regardless.

Then the airport, which is thirty-five minutes away on the MAX with one change, or twenty-five in a taxi.