The Best Things to Do in Lubbock, Texas

The city runs this one, which is why it costs ten dollars and not thirty. The Buddy Holly galleries hold the artifacts, from childhood through the professional years, and the building itself is the restored Fort Worth and Denver freight depot on an avenue the city renamed for the Crickets. The Fine Arts Gallery at the same address is free and rotates regional work, so you can walk in without paying if you only have twenty minutes.

Admission is ten dollars general, eight for 60 and over, five for ages 7 to 17 and for college students with ID, and free for children 6 and under, members, active military and veterans. Go before the windmills or the ranching center rather than after, because this is the one that puts the rest of the city in context.

This is not a museum with photographs of ranch buildings. It is 27 acres of actual ranch buildings, 49 of them, disassembled where they stood and rebuilt here in chronological order, running from the 1780s to the 1950s. Thirty of the 49 are between 100 and 177 years old. You walk from a one room picket cabin to a 1917 ranch headquarters in about forty minutes.

Admission is free, which makes it the best value in the city by a wide margin. It is administered through the Museum of Texas Tech University, so if you are doing both, they are a five minute drive apart on the same street.

Billie Wolfe and Coy Harris started this in 1993 and it has grown into something genuinely singular. More than 170 restored windmills sit on 28 acres of city park land, over 100 of them indoors and more than 50 standing outside in the wind, which is the point. There is a 6,000 square foot mural on the history of wind power and a large model railroad layout that most visitors do not expect.

Admission runs $7.50 for adults, $6 for 60 and over, $5 for ages 5 to 12, and free under 5. It closed for the Fourth of July in 2026 for a private event, which is a reminder that this is a small operation and the calendar can move.

Over 200,000 square feet and nine permanent galleries covering anthropology, art, clothing and textiles, history, paleontology and natural history, with a holding of about 9.5 million objects behind them. The dinosaur hall and the Ice Age gallery are the ones children make straight for. The southwest Indian art and the 20th and 21st century art galleries are the ones adults linger in.

Admission to the museum is free every day. The Moody Planetarium is inside, named by the Moody Foundation in 1970 when the current building went up, and it charges separately for its show schedule.

An archaeological and natural history preserve holding evidence of almost 12,000 years of people living on the Southern High Plains, from Clovis hunters forward. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, designated a National Historic Landmark and recognized as a State Archeological Landmark, which is a rare set of three. Research and public programming have run continuously here since 1973.

Admission and parking are free. The Robert A. Nash Interpretive Center is fully wheelchair accessible with ramp access from the lot. Accessibility on the outdoor trail network varies a good deal, so check the trails page before you plan around a wheelchair or a stroller.

Gliders are the part of the Second World War almost nobody covers. These were engineless cargo aircraft towed into combat and cut loose, and the men who flew them had no engine, no armor and no way back. The museum is built around a fully restored Waco CG-4A you stand under, with a restored C-47 tow plane and galleries of first person material from the pilots.

It sits in the old Lubbock airport terminal next to Million Air at Preston Smith International, which is a fitting building for it. Prices match the Buddy Holly Center, ten dollars general, eight for 60 and over, five for ages 7 to 17 and students, free for under 6, members, active military and veterans.

Opened January 6, 2021 at a cost of $158 million across 220,000 square feet, and it changed what can tour through West Texas. The main room is the 2,297 seat Helen DeVitt Jones Theater. The Crickets Theater next door seats 415 and is the better room for a touring songwriter or a local production. Ballet Lubbock is resident here and Lubbock ISD is a partner.

This is the one listing on the page that depends entirely on the calendar. On a night with nothing booked there is no reason to drive over. On a night with a Broadway run or a Ballet Lubbock program, it is the best seat in the region.

It opened on April 8, 1938 as Lubbock's first suburban neighborhood movie theater, with air conditioning, 720 seats and a marquee carrying 750 feet of neon. Television and the drive-ins killed it as a cinema in 1958. Don Caldwell and a group of investors bought the building in 1993, added a full stage and reopened it in 1995. It now seats 426 and runs live music, musicals and classic film.

The original balcony and the raked floor survived the rebuild. The murals on both walls, painted by John Russell Thomasson, show Caprock Canyon. It is a two minute walk from the Buddy Holly Center, which makes the Depot District an evening rather than a stop.

Most people think Fredericksburg when they think Texas wine. Most of the fruit is grown up here on the High Plains, and Llano Estacado has been crafting wine in Lubbock since 1976, which makes it one of the oldest operations in the modern Texas industry. The tasting room is a working winery's tasting room, not a resort.

Opening times shift for events and Texas Tech game days, so the pattern matters more than any single posted hour. Reservations are recommended and walk-ins are taken. The company also runs a wine bar in town and a second tasting space in Fredericksburg.

K.N. Clapp watched the federal poisoning campaigns of the 1930s and concluded the black-tailed prairie dog was headed for extinction. In 1935 he designed an enclosure in Mackenzie Park and, with his friend Ross Edwards, trapped two pairs to start it. It was the first protected prairie dog community of its kind anywhere, and he looked after it himself until he died in 1969.

The city Parks and Recreation department runs it now. It costs nothing, it takes twenty minutes, and it is consistently one of the attractions out of town visitors actually remember. The colony sits inside Mackenzie Park overlooking Meadowbrook Golf Course.