Teddy Roosevelt did a lot to help American tourism with his strenuous advocacy for national parks, but other presidents have him beat when it comes to actual tourists.
TIME looked at all the federal land each president established, according to the National Park Service — from national parks to battlefields to national historic sites — as well as each president’s library and monuments to him. (We did not count roadways.)
Totaling the annual visitor statistics for each location, the president who came out on top was Richard Nixon, with more than 31 million tourists visiting his sites in 2014.
Nixon may not have founded any of the gorgeous parks in America’s heartland that we tend to associate with this kind of tourism: Yosemite was Abraham Lincoln, the Grand Canyon was Teddy Roosevelt, and Yellowstone was Ulysses S. Grant, to name a few.
But Nixon has a trump card that launches him to the No. 1 spot: Golden Gate National Recreation Area, an 80,000-acre park in San Francisco with views of the bridge. It attracted more than 15 million visitors in 2014, dwarfing the Grand Canyon’s 4.7 million. (The park with the second-most visitors after Golden Gate is Great Smoky Mountains, established by Calvin Coolidge, which garnered more than 10 million visitors in 2014.)
Here are the leading presidents based on tourism numbers, and their top site:
1. Richard Nixon – 31,597,349/Golden Gate National Recreation Area
2. Franklin Delano Roosevelt – 27,110,229/Lake Mead National Recreation Area
3. Calvin Coolidge – 24,789,380/Great Smoky Mountains National Park
4. Lyndon B. Johnson – 19,997,226/Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area
5. Jimmy Carter – 17,118,803/Vietnam Veterans Memorial
This article was originally published in the July 13 issue of TIME.
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