Advertisements
Portage
Lakeside City with a Nautical Touch
Portage is the largest city in the Indiana Dunes area, and, like our other communities, it is extremely outdoors-friendly, with trails, parks, and recreational facilities. The parks scattered throughout the city feature everything from a mountain biking trail to a skate park.
Portage is home to unique events—like the Elvis FANtasy Fest—and an entirely public marina, where visitors and residents can both launch out onto Lake Michigan and dock their boats in public slips.
Visitors can rent a boat or jet ski at CMS Marine and pilot it out onto Lake Michigan or relax and hire a charter boat for fishing and sightseeing.
Instead of one centralized downtown area, Portage is comprised of different pockets of business, recreation, and entertainment areas. Looking for family fun? Enjoy a movie at Portage 16 IMAX (one of the state’s few IMAX movie theaters), visit the Bass Pro Shop sportsman superstore, or head into one of the nation’s largest, most ecologically diverse national parks—the Indiana Dunes National Park. The Park has great sites in Portage like West Beach (voted one of the Top 10 Family Beaches in the nation) and Portage Lakefront and Riverwalk (a park that sits side-by-side with industry, but seems a world apart from it).
From its founding as a place where pioneers and Native Americans lived side by side, to about 40 years ago when a trinity of towns united to become one, Portage has always been a place where people of diverse backgrounds come together to work, live, and play in the shadow of a beautiful natural treasure.
Things to do in Portage:
- Experience expanses of nature at sites like West Beach, Tolleston Dunes Trail, and Portage Lakefront and Riverwalk.
- Sit back, relax, and then get blown away at Portage 16 IMAX—the only place in Northern Indiana offering an eight-story IMAX screen.
- Recharge and have fun at Quaker Steak & Lube, a restaurant with a real working NASCAR, three corvettes, and eight motorcycles hanging from the ceiling—or enjoy other great restaurants like Cappo’s, Fuji Japanese Restaurant, and Bulldog on the Lake.
- Shop in an outdoorsman’s paradise — Bass Pro Shops — and be sure to enjoy a seafood dish at the in-store Islamorada Fish Company restaurant.
- Get all shook up at Elvis FANtasy Fest each October and celebrate Elvis’s music legacy.
- Check out the Sammie L. Maletta Public Marina and get onto Lake Michigan to see the Indiana Dunes from a unique vantage point.
Learn more at Ci.Portage.IN.US or PortageINChamber.com.