At the westernmost fringe of the Great 'Are We There Yet' Plains, Colorado's 'Mile High City' beckons like an urban avatar of welcome relief. On par with much larger cities, Denver is Middle America's de facto hub of culture and commerce, offering all the perks (and few of the pangs) of any modern American metropolis, with a surrounding landscape that lends the city its illustrious 'grounded' identity. Nestled up against the magnificent Rocky Mountains, Denver is the perfect destination for anyone who has trouble choosing between big-city and backwoods attractions or thinks a hard day's hell raising is best finished off with high tea at a 19th-century society hotel. After all, where else can you enjoy a buffalo tenderloin before a night at the symphony and top the evening with a nightcap at an art deco bar modeled on that of the Queen Mary?

Its skyscrapers marking the final transition between the Great Plains and the American West, DENVER stands at the threshold of the Rocky Mountains . Despite being known as the " Mile High City ," and serving as the obvious point of arrival for travelers heading into the mountains, it is itself uniformly flat. The majestic peaks are clearly visible, but they only begin to rise roughly fifteen miles west of downtown, and Denver has, during the last century, had plenty of room to spread out.

Mineral wealth has always been at the heart of the city's prosperity, with all the fluctuations of fortune that this entails. Though local resources have been progressively exhausted, Denver has managed to hang on to its role as the most important commercial and transportation nexus in the state. Its original "foundation" in 1858 was by pure chance; this was the first spot where small quantities of gold were discovered in Colorado. There was no significant river, let alone a road, but prospectors came streaming in, regardless of prior claims to the land - least of all those of the Arapahoe , who had supposedly been confirmed in their ownership of the area by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851. Various communities had their own names for the settlement; with the judicious distribution of whiskey, one faction persuaded the rest to agree to "Denver" in 1859. The hope was to ingratiate themselves with the governor of the Kansas Territory, James Denver, but it turned out he had already resigned. The newspaperman Horace Greeley passed through in the early days, and described the place as a "log city of 150 dwellings, not three-fourths completed nor two-thirds inhabited, nor one-third fit to be."

Population: 500,000
Area: 110 sq miles (275 sq km)
Elevation: 5280ft (1585m)
State: Colorado
Time Zone: Mountain Time (GMT/UTC minus 7 hours)
Telephone area code: 303 & 720

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