Eureka Springs, Arkansas Is a Victorian Town in the Ozarks That Became a Queer Sanctuary in the Middle of the Bible Belt

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Eureka Springs sits deep in the Arkansas Ozarks, a town of roughly 2,000 people built into a hillside so steep that many of its Victorian-era buildings have entrances on different streets depending on which floor you approach from. It was founded in 1879 around natural springs believed to have healing properties, boomed as a resort town in the late 1800s, and then largely stalled economically for much of the 20th century, which accidentally preserved its architecture. That same economic stagnation, combined with a long-running counterculture and arts community, eventually made it one of the more unexpected LGBTQ+ destinations in the American South.

How a Town in Rural Arkansas Became “Gay-reka”

Eureka Springs’ shift toward becoming an LGBTQ+ haven traces back decades, with roots in the town’s long history as an artists’ colony and its geographic isolation, which made it a place where people who didn’t fit comfortably elsewhere in the rural South could settle with less scrutiny than they’d face in a smaller, more visible community. By the 2000s and 2010s, the town had a critical mass of gay-owned bed and breakfasts, bars, and shops substantial enough that publications began referring to it, sometimes affectionately and sometimes as a punchline, as “Gay-reka,” according to coverage from outlets including OutSmart Magazine.

The town became a flashpoint in 2015 when it passed a local anti-discrimination ordinance protecting LGBTQ+ residents, directly ahead of statewide legislation that would have preempted such local ordinances, a conflict The New York Times covered as emblematic of the broader clash between the state’s Christian conservative identity and its tourism economy’s growing dependence on a diverse, accepting visitor base.

The Architecture That Never Got Demolished

Eureka Springs’ entire downtown is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, one of very few American towns to have its whole commercial district recognized this way. The 1886 Crescent Hotel, a grand Victorian structure perched above town, has leaned into a reputation as one of America’s most haunted hotels, running ghost tours that have become a genuine economic driver alongside the town’s arts and LGBTQ+ tourism. Because the town’s economy stagnated for so long after its initial 19th-century boom, developers never had the capital or incentive to tear down and replace the original buildings the way so many other small American towns did during mid-20th-century urban renewal, leaving a downtown that looks remarkably like it did over a century ago.

• Entire downtown listed on the National Register of Historic Places
• Passed a local LGBTQ+ anti-discrimination ordinance in 2015, ahead of conflicting state legislation
• Long-running annual Diversity Weekend festival draws visitors specifically for the town’s LGBTQ+ community events
• Population around 2,000, with a tourism economy that dramatically outsizes what that population would suggest

What It Looks Like Now

Today’s Eureka Springs runs on a combination of art galleries, antique shops, ghost tours, wedding tourism (same-sex weddings became a substantial part of the local economy well before nationwide legalization), and a food and bar scene disproportionately developed for a town this size. The Great Passion Play, an outdoor religious drama running since the 1960s, still draws a completely different visitor demographic than the town’s LGBTQ+-oriented businesses, and the coexistence of both audiences in a town this small is part of what makes Eureka Springs such a genuinely unusual place — not a simple, single-identity tourist destination, but a town that has learned, sometimes uneasily, to hold two very different Arkansas constituencies within the same eight square miles.

The Great Passion Play’s Uneasy Neighbor Status

The Great Passion Play, a large outdoor production depicting the final days of Jesus Christ, has run seasonally in Eureka Springs since 1968 and remains one of the most-attended outdoor dramas in the country, drawing a conservative Christian audience that in some respects represents the opposite end of the town’s visitor spectrum from its LGBTQ+ tourism base. The site’s founder, Gerald L. K. Smith, had a documented history of antisemitic and white supremacist activity, a legacy the current operators have worked to distance the attraction from in recent decades, even as the tension between the play’s conservative religious audience and the town’s broader progressive reputation remains part of Eureka Springs’ unusual character. Locals describe both audiences coexisting in the same small downtown largely without friction, a testament to how thoroughly the town’s tourism economy depends on accommodating a wider range of visitors than its small population might suggest it could support.

A Town That Runs on Bed and Breakfasts

Eureka Springs has one of the highest concentrations of bed and breakfasts per capita of any small American town, a legacy of its Victorian-era boarding house infrastructure that proved perfectly suited to boutique hospitality once the town’s tourism economy took off. Many of these properties are individually owned and operated, giving the town’s lodging economy a fragmented, locally controlled character that has so far mostly resisted the large hotel chain development seen in comparably sized tourist towns elsewhere in the country, preserving both the architecture and the small-business character that continues to define Eureka Springs’ identity today.

Eureka Springs remains, in the end, a genuinely unusual American town precisely because it never resolved its contradictions into a single, marketable identity — it just kept all of them, the ghost tours, the religious drama, the Pride events, running simultaneously in a town of two thousand people tucked into an Ozark hillside.

Arkansas as a whole has leaned increasingly on Eureka Springs as a tourism showpiece even as some of the state’s broader politics have moved in a direction its own LGBTQ+ residents describe as hostile, an irony not lost on the town’s business owners, many of whom depend on exactly the visitor base state-level policy sometimes seems designed to alienate. That tension, between a single unusually welcoming town and a broader state political climate, is unlikely to resolve cleanly in either direction any time soon.

Eureka Springs’ city council continues to field pressure from both directions of its visitor base, occasionally revisiting zoning and event-permitting questions that pit the interests of its arts-and-LGBTQ+-oriented businesses against those tied to the Great Passion Play’s more conservative audience, a low-simmering local political dynamic that outsiders rarely notice during a weekend visit but that shapes town governance year-round.