As part of National Travel and Tourism Week, the Providence Warwick Convention & Visitors Bureau (CVB) announced the launch of two new self-guided walking tours featuring Downtown and the West Side. Produced with partners at the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities (RICH), the Rhode Island Historical Society (RIHS), and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, among others, the tours are available through print maps, the goprovidence.com website, and the free Rhode Tour phone app.

After the CVB launched a successful East Side walking tour a few years ago, the organization wanted to digitize the information and expand the product with new installments. Through a Providence Tourism Council grant, the new tours came to fruition.

While the West Side tour focus on an immigration theme, the Downtown tour describes the economic core of the city and its recent transformation. While you explore the city on foot, the tours help you make connections between places and the stories behind them, highlighting how things happened and why they look the way they do today.

Pick up a paper map at the visitor center in the RI Convention Center, or find more information at rhodetour.org and goprovidence.com.