With impressive views over the Danube and Sava rivers, Belgrade's Kalemegdan Fortress is home to several city museums, galleries, memorials, the planetarium, and zoo, as well as smart cafés, restaurants and paths filled with locals and tourists seeking tranquility in the city. The fortress's historic walls shape its exterior and interior, holding in elm trees and a well-kept park, which peacefully replace a long succession of rulers and their warriors.

Walking back into the city, along the pedestrian street Knez Mihailova, 19^th century Belgrade architecture lines the city's most traveled shopping thoroughfare. In summer, the center of the street becomes an extended outdoor café. Restaurants and galleries are located on the side streets leading to and from Knez Mihailova, which ends up at Trg Republike (Republic Square). Now a popular meeting point surrounded by cafés and the grand buildings of the National Museum (under reconstruction currently, though with frequent exhibits in its atrium) and National Theater (home to the city's major opera, ballet, orchestra and theater performances), this square was the center of protest and revolution during the last decade. 

Belgrade expands outward from there, east to the district of Dorcol and its fashionable cafés and restaurants on Strahinica Bana, as well as the artist's quarter of Skardarlija and its cobbled Skadarska street, where you can find classic kafanas (taverns) serving traditional Serbian dishes as musicians roam from table to table.

Extending south is Belgrade's business and government center, with the national parliament, city hall, former royal residence and the skyline-dominating Beogradjanka. The world's largest Orthodox church, St. Sava (open to the public during its continued construction), can be found just past that in a park along with the National Library.

In the Vracar district you can find Belgrade's stately urban residences, one of which now houses the Museum of Nikola Tesla, home to the influential scientist's legacy to electrical engineering. In Dedinje, a leafy suburb with embassies, ambassador's residences and the city's most expensive mansions, is located the Mausoleum of Josip Broz Tito, Yugoslavia's former president-for-life.

Across the Sava River lies the Usce park, a spacious green space that holds the city's tallest building and the Museum of Contemporary Art. The park is a popular place for runners and walkers, as well as the many people who visit the restaurants, clubs and cafés located on the boats that are moored on the riverbanks. The boats stretch all the way up the Danube, inside Great War Island, to the city of Zemun, the former Austro-Hungarian southern stronghold.

During the summer, the city's population escapes to Ada Ciganlija, an island in the Sava that is home to a several kilometer long café-lined beach around its lake, an extensive system of parks and athletic areas, as well as more clubs that work through the hot summer nights.