How Durango earned the score
Population 19,071 residents at 6,532 feet in Colorado’s far southwest corner, closer to Albuquerque than to Denver.
Situation A town built to move silver and gold, left with a 45-mile railroad to a near-ghost town when the ore ran thin.
Action Kept the narrow-gauge steam train running, got it federally protected, and grew an entire visitor economy in its orbit.
Result $474.6M in 2023 La Plata County travel spending, roughly 22,000 tourism jobs, and Colorado’s No. 1 most loved destination two years running.
Durango was built to move silver and gold. When the ore ran thin, the town had to decide what it was for.
Durango did not grow up the slow way, around a crossroads or a courthouse. It was conjured almost overnight. The town was organized between September 1880 and April 1881 by the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, planted in the Animas Valley as the supply hub for the silver and gold being pulled out of the San Juan Mountains. The railroad reached town in 1881, and the final 45-mile stretch of track up to the mines at Silverton was finished in July 1882, an astonishing eleven months of work through some of the most brutal terrain in Colorado, according to the railroad’s own history.
For a few decades, the math was simple. The mountains held metal, the train hauled it down, and Durango fed and housed the people who made that happen. The Strater Hotel opened in 1887 after $70,000 and 376,000 native red bricks, built to put up the mine investors and travelers stepping off the train, and it still anchors the south end of Main Avenue today, per its hotel history.
Then the metal economy did what metal economies do. Prices fell, the richest veins played out, and the country moved on. A town that exists to serve mines has a problem when the mines slow down. The infrastructure that defined Durango, that improbable little train, was suddenly a 45-mile line to a near-ghost town. The situation was the oldest one in the rural-tourism book: a place with a remarkable asset and a fading reason to use it.
Find an identity worth keeping
The job was not to mourn the mining era. It was to decide what Durango would sell to the world instead, and to mean it.
Plenty of Western towns hit this fork and chose forgettable answers. They paved the historic district, chased a factory, or let the main street hollow out and become a place you drive through on the way to somewhere photogenic. The task for Durango was sharper and harder: it had, sitting right in the middle of town, a piece of working machinery that the rest of the country had already started to romanticize. The question was whether to treat the narrow-gauge railroad as obsolete equipment to be scrapped, or as the single most ownable identity the town would ever have.
This is the decision the Visitor Impact Score is built to reward. A town can inherit a mountain or a coastline and do very little with it. What is rare, and what scores high, is a place that takes one specific, defensible idea and commits to it completely. Durango did not need to invent a story. It needed the discipline to protect the one it already had, and to keep a steam train running long after every economic spreadsheet said to stop.
Why a working steam train was worth more than the silver
By the early twentieth century the Silverton branch was a curiosity. The same features that made it impractical, the narrow 3-foot gauge, the coal smoke, the slow climb along the Animas gorge, were exactly what made it magical to a traveler. The line had run continuously since 1881, and by 1962 it was already pulling more than 37,000 passengers a summer purely as a ride, not as freight, according to Wikipedia’s history of the railroad.
That is the quiet lesson buried in Durango’s story. The asset did not become valuable because it was useful. It became valuable because it was unrepeatable. No new town can build an authentic 1880s steam railroad, which is precisely why protecting an old one is a strategy and not just nostalgia.
Protect the train, then build a town worth the trip
Durango kept the railroad alive, got it federally protected, and grew an entire visitor economy in its orbit instead of replacing it.
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Step one: never let the train stop
The most important action was also the least glamorous: keep it running. The line has operated continuously since 1881, one of the rare American railroads that can say so, per the railroad’s record. The country noticed. The route was designated a National Historic Landmark on July 4, 1961, and the American Society of Civil Engineers named it a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in 1968. When the parent railroad finally wanted out, Florida citrus grower Charles Bradshaw Jr. bought the 45-mile Silverton branch and all its rolling stock outright on March 25, 1981, and ran it as a standalone tourist railroad rather than letting it die with the freight business.
Step two: make the whole town part of the experience
A train is a ride. A destination is what surrounds it. Durango treated its historic core as part of the same asset: Main Avenue is a Nationally Registered Historic District, and the Strater Hotel, with what it bills as the world’s largest collection of American Victorian walnut antiques, turned a place to sleep into a place to walk through. The depot, the hotels, the brick storefronts and the river all read as one continuous nineteenth-century stage set that happens to still be in use.
Step three: stack reasons to stay longer
Then Durango added the layers that turn a day trip into a week. The Animas River runs straight through downtown for rafting and fishing. Fort Lewis College sits on a 350-foot mesa above town, feeding a young, year-round, creative population. An hour west lies Mesa Verde National Park, a World Heritage Site, which means a visitor can pair the steam train with ancient cliff dwellings in a single trip. None of these replaced the railroad. They all borrowed its gravity.
The detail most towns miss: tourism revenue funded the next thing
Durango did not just collect visitor dollars, it reinvested them deliberately. The city’s lodger’s tax is split with intent: roughly 55% funds destination marketing through Visit Durango, while the remainder is routed to transportation and transit (20%), arts and culture (14%), and tourism-impact and community priorities (11%), according to the Durango Herald.
That is the difference between a town that gets visited and a town that compounds. The train created the visits, the visits created the tax base, and the tax base was spent making the experience deeper and easier to reach, which created more visits. It is a flywheel, and it started with refusing to scrap one old locomotive.
A No. 1 destination with a real economy under it
The bet paid off in dollars, jobs, and rankings. Durango is now measured against the best small destinations in the country.
The numbers are the kind most towns of 19,000 only dream about. In 2023, travel spending in La Plata County rose 7.7% to $474.6 million, with travel earnings of $163.1 million and 3,720 direct travel-generated jobs, per the Durango Herald. Looked at more broadly, the local tourism economy supports roughly 22,000 jobs with combined wages exceeding $342 million a year, and in the first quarter of 2026 alone visitors spent nearly $117 million in the community, according to the same paper.
The reputation followed the revenue. Durango was named the No. 1 most loved destination in Colorado for two years running on the Tourism Sentiment Index, and ranked 15th in the entire United States and 67th in the world among more than 21,000 destinations, the Durango Herald reported. That is the payoff of a town reading the same way to a visitor in person as it does in a photograph. The story is consistent, and the story is true.
And the train itself is no museum piece kept on life support. The Durango & Silverton runs 45.2 miles of 3-foot narrow-gauge track on a route that, by the late 1970s, was already carrying more than 120,000 passengers a year, per Wikipedia. More than a century after the silver gave out, the thing the town refused to scrap is still the main event.
Own one true thing, completely
Durango’s edge is not the mountains. Plenty of towns have mountains. It is the discipline to protect one unrepeatable identity and build everything else around it.
If you strip Durango down to its lesson, it is almost stubbornly simple. A town that tries to be a little of everything reads as a little of nothing. A town that picks one ownable, defensible, hard-to-copy identity, and then has the patience to protect it for a century, ends up on the short list of places people cross the country to see. The steam train could have been scrapped a dozen times on purely rational grounds. Keeping it was the single most valuable economic decision the town ever made.
That is exactly what the Visitor Impact Score is designed to find and reward. Durango lands at 96, a Destination Leader, because it does not merely possess a great asset, it has organized its entire downtown, its tax policy, and its public reputation around one coherent, one-of-one story. The biggest opportunity for almost every town we score is to find their version of the train: the single true thing they can own better than anyone, and then refuse to let go of it.