Map - Glenwood Springs, Colorado (Glenwood Springs)

Glenwood Springs is a home rule municipality that is the county seat of Garfield County, Colorado, United States. The city population was 9,963 at the 2020 United States Census. Glenwood Springs is located at the confluence of the Roaring Fork River and the Colorado River, connecting the Roaring Fork Valley and a series of smaller towns up and down the Colorado River.

Glenwood Springs is a destination for many vacationers, and is known for its hot springs.

For thousands of years, the area that is now Glenwood Springs was populated by Indigenous people before the colonization of the Americas. The oral history of the Kapuuta and Mouache bands recall that Glenwood Springs is located within the "traditional Nuuchiu tuvupu (The People's Land) of the Subuagan and Parianuche bands." Fred Conetah's History of the Northern Utes states that the Yampa or White River bands used the area, which is now in the Ute ancestral jurisdiction. The Utes were nomadic hunter-gatherers who seasonally used the natural hot springs in the area. The U.S. government surveyed the land in the mid-19th century, although they had no claim on the land. An 1868 treaty negotiated by the Tabeguache Ute Chief Ouray preserved the hunting grounds in the area of present-day Glenwood Springs.

For a short time in the 19th century, Glenwood Springs was known as "Defiance", a name sometimes still used by local teams or businesses. Defiance was established in 1883, as a camp of tents, saloons, and brothels with an increasing amount of cabins and lodging establishments. It was populated with gamblers, gunslingers, and prostitutes. Isaac Cooper was the founder of the town. His wife Sarah was having a hard time adjusting to the frontier life and, in an attempt to make her environment somewhat more comfortable, persuaded the founders to change the name to Glenwood Springs, Colorado, after her hometown of Glenwood, Iowa.

Glenwood Springs, then a small encampment, was not the original county seat of Garfield County. Rather, a larger mining town that had been seeded with silver in order to attract miners on top of the Flat Tops mountains named Carbonate was the original county seat. Carbonate briefly had a post office, but the mail courier who won the contract to deliver mail to Carbonate found only one miner living there on his first delivery, which took 65 km horizontally and 1.5 km vertically. In the end, the courier paid the miner $100 in 1880s dollars to move out so that the post office could be closed and he would not have to make the journey again. Carbonate remained the county seat for only four months before Glenwood Springs was selected by voters as the new location.

The location of Glenwood Springs, and its railroad stop, established a center of commerce in the area. The city has seen well-known visitors, including President Teddy Roosevelt, who spent a summer vacation living out of the historic Hotel Colorado. Doc Holliday, who was known for the O.K. Corral gunfight, spent the final months of his life in Glenwood Springs and is buried in the town's original Pioneer Cemetery above Bennett Avenue. Kid Curry is buried in the same location. The serial killer Ted Bundy was imprisoned in the Glenwood Springs jail until he escaped on the night of December 30, 1977, an escape which went undetected for 17 hours. Glenwood Springs was one of the first places in the United States to have electric lights. The original lighting was installed in 1897 inside of the Fairy Caves in Iron Mountain. Later, a dam was built in Glenwood Canyon, providing water for the Shoshone power plant. The plant began producing power on May 16, 1909, and retains the largest and oldest water rights to the Colorado River, the "Shoshone Call", which is valuable for the protection of Colorado River water rather than the minimal electricity produced.

In 2015, the town was named the "Most Vibrant Small Town Arts Environment in the United States" by Southern Methodist University and the 5th Best Place to Live in America by Outside magazine. It was named the "Most Fun Town in America" by Rand McNally and USA Today in 2011.