Georgia Attractions

The Georgia stops worth building a day around. Atlanta's Coca-Cola vault and a whale shark the size of a school bus, the oak-shaded squares of Savannah, a visionary's painted folk-art compound in Buena Vista, FDR's Little White House, and a 56-foot sheet-metal chicken in Marietta. The famous, the historic, and the gloriously strange.

45 places · Georgia

More to explore

🎡 Attractions

Andersonville National Historic Site

Andersonville, GA · Southwest Georgia

On the ground where Camp Sumter held more than 45,000 Union prisoners in its final fourteen months, a reconstructed stretch of stockade wall and the rows of white headstones at the national cemetery mark where nearly 13,000 men died. The National Prisoner of War Museum carries the story forward to every American who has been held captive, and Providence Spring still runs beneath the 1901 pavilion the survivors built. It is a quiet, heavy place that rewards slow walking and unhurried reading.

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Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park

Macon, GA · Middle Georgia

Rising from the Macon flats above the Ocmulgee River, these earthen mounds were raised a thousand years ago by Mississippian people who carried the soil basket by basket. Climb the Great Temple Mound for the view its builders had, then duck into a reconstructed earth lodge whose original clay floor, ringed with molded seats, dates to around the year 1015. The visitor center and several miles of trail through the old town make it the most significant Native American site in the state.

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High Museum of Art

Atlanta, GA · Metro Atlanta

The Southeast's largest art museum holds more than 20,000 works behind a white facade that is itself a landmark: Richard Meier's gleaming 1983 building, later doubled by Renzo Piano's 2005 wing of skylit galleries. Inside you move through American painting, African art, folk and self-taught work, and a deep photography collection, with the light from above shifting as you climb the spiraling ramps. It anchors the Woodruff Arts Center on Midtown's Peachtree Street, an easy pairing with a symphony night or a walk through the surrounding arts district.

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Atlanta History Center

Atlanta, GA · Metro Atlanta

Thirty-three acres in Buckhead hold a museum, woodland trails, and a clutch of restored homes, anchored by the 1928 Swan House and its cascading fountain staircase. The Cyclorama brings you face-to-face with a 49-foot-tall hand-painted panorama of the Battle of Atlanta, restored to its full circular sweep. Between the gardens, the farmhouse, and galleries tracing the city from the Civil War to the 1996 Olympics, an afternoon here doubles as a walk through Atlanta itself.

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Mercer-Williams House Museum

Savannah, GA · Savannah

The red-brick Italianate mansion on Monterey Square was designed in 1860 by architect John S. Norris for General Hugh Mercer, great-grandfather of songwriter Johnny Mercer, and rescued from ruin a century later by antiques dealer Jim Williams. It is the house at the center of the 1981 killing chronicled in John Berendt's book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Guided tours move through the foyer, Williams's study and the dining room, where his collection of 18th and 19th century furniture and Savannah portraiture still fills the rooms.

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The Varsity

Atlanta, GA · Metro Atlanta

Open since 1928 on the edge of Georgia Tech, this is the world's largest drive-in restaurant, a two-block stretch of red-and-white where carhops once worked the lot and the counter crew still barks What'll ya have at anyone who pauses too long. Order chili dogs, onion rings, and a Frosted Orange under the neon, then carry the tray up to a tiered TV room to eat the way Atlanta has for nearly a century. It is roadside Americana that never turned into a museum piece, just a loud, greasy, deeply local rite of passage.

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College Football Hall of Fame

Atlanta, GA · Metro Atlanta

A three-story wall of 768 helmets greets you at the door, one for every program in the college game, and the one from your school lights up when you register at the entrance. The 45-yard indoor field downstairs lets you run routes, kick field goals, and test your forty time before you ever reach the bronze busts of the inducted. It sits across from Centennial Olympic Park in downtown Atlanta, an easy pairing with the aquarium and the Coca-Cola museum next door.

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Center for Puppetry Arts

Atlanta, GA · Metro Atlanta

Jim Henson and Kermit the Frog cut the ribbon here in 1978, and the building has been the country's largest home for puppetry ever since. The Worlds of Puppetry Museum holds the largest collection of Henson artifacts anywhere, with retired Muppets and pieces from The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth alongside marionettes, rod puppets, and shadow figures from around the globe. Between live shows in the theater and a workshop where you build a puppet to take home, it rewards a slow afternoon.

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SCAD Museum of Art

Savannah, GA · Savannah

Set inside the 1856 Gray Building, the only surviving antebellum railroad complex in the country, this museum wraps a Greek Revival shell around galleries that pivot from haute couture to contemporary installation. An 86-foot steel-and-glass lantern rises from the historic brick, redrawing the Savannah skyline and pulling daylight down into the permanent collection of more than 4,500 works. Rotating shows from the SCAD program keep the walls changing, so a second visit rarely repeats the first.

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Tybee Island Light Station

Tybee Island, GA · Savannah

Georgia's oldest and tallest lighthouse has guided ships toward the Savannah River since the colony's earliest days, and the black-white-black tower you climb today rises 145 feet on a base that dates to 1773. The 178-step climb opens onto a gallery view of the Atlantic and Cockspur Island, and the beacon still throws light through its original first-order Fresnel lens. Down at ground level the restored station keeps its 1881 head keeper's cottage and summer kitchen, so the whole working light complex stays intact rather than just the tower.

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Fort Pulaski National Monument

Savannah, GA · Savannah

This pentagonal brick fort guards Cockspur Island where the Savannah River meets the sea, and its walls still carry the pockmarks of the 1862 Union bombardment that ended masonry fortification for good. New rifled cannon punched clean through seven and a half feet of brick in thirty hours, a result so decisive that engineers stopped building forts like this one. Walk the ramparts and the casemates, watch for painted buntings and alligators in the surrounding marsh, then climb the lighthouse-keeper views back toward Tybee.

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Hay House

Macon, GA · Middle Georgia

Macon's Italian Renaissance Revival mansion, built between 1855 and 1859 and nicknamed the Palace of the South, climbs four stories to a three-story cupola over 24 rooms and roughly 18,000 square feet. The Johnston-Felton-Hay House was decades ahead of its time, with indoor plumbing, a speaker-tube intercom and a walk-in safe, and a tour walks you past stained glass, trompe l'oeil ceilings and the original 1850s plasterwork. It is a National Historic Landmark run by the Georgia Trust, and the splayed stone steps and bowed front terrace alone are worth the stop.

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Allman Brothers Band Museum at the Big House

Macon, GA · Middle Georgia

From 1970 to 1973 this Vineville Avenue Tudor was home base for the Allman Brothers Band, their families, and their road crew, and today it holds the largest collection of band memorabilia anywhere. Walk through the bedrooms and the music room to see Duane Allman's guitars, Berry Oakley's bass, handwritten setlists, and the gold records that came out of those years. The restored house lets you stand where Southern rock took shape, instruments and clothing and photographs kept exactly as the people who made the music left them.

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Booth Western Art Museum

Cartersville, GA · Northwest Georgia

Behind a Bulgarian-limestone facade an hour north of Atlanta sits the largest permanent exhibition space for Western art in the country, where Remington bronzes and sweeping Bierstadt landscapes share the floor with movie posters and saddles. A presidential gallery lines up signed letters and portraits of every U.S. president, and a hands-on ranch space lets kids rope and saddle up while the grown-ups linger over the Russells. It is a genuinely strange and wonderful thing to find the American frontier rendered in such depth in small-town Georgia.

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Babyland General Hospital

Cleveland, GA · North Georgia Mountains

This columned white mansion is the official "birthplace" of the Cabbage Patch Kids, the soft-sculpture dolls Xavier Roberts dreamed up in these North Georgia hills. Time your visit for the hourly "delivery," when a Licensed Patch Nurse tends the Magic Crystal Tree, announces that a Mother Cabbage is in labor, doses her with "Imagicillin," and pulls a freshly born baby from the leaves while pink and blue BunnyBees decide the gender. You wander rooms full of dolls in incubators and adoption cribs, and yes, you can take one home with its own birth certificate. Admission is free, the staff play it gloriously straight, and the whole thing lands somewhere between sweet and wonderfully surreal.

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Old Car City USA

White, GA · Northwest Georgia

Billed as the world's largest classic-car junkyard, this 34-acre forest swallows more than 4,000 vehicles built in 1972 or earlier, most of them rusting hulks from the 1950s and 60s with saplings growing up through their hoods. What began as a 1931 general store turned into a salvage yard, and the family who still runs it now charges photographers a few dollars more than walkers because that is who really comes: this is a photo pilgrimage, with 6-plus miles of pine-needle trails winding past moss-furred Fords and the famous "two-ton flowerpot" Chevy. Plan on several hours, wear real shoes, and note it is open Tuesday through Saturday, roughly 9 to 4. Bring a camera and let the rust and roots do the rest.

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Rock City Gardens

Lookout Mountain, GA · Northwest Georgia

A walking trail threads between towering ancient sandstone formations atop Lookout Mountain, past the 100-foot Mushroom Rock, across the swaying Swing-A-Long Bridge, and out to Lover's Leap, where on a clear day you can pick out seven states from a single overlook. The path ends underground in Fairyland Caverns, a series of black-lit dioramas of nursery-rhyme scenes built in the 1940s. Opened to the public in 1932, it is the attraction behind the barn-roof slogan that spread across the South: See Rock City.

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The Big Chicken

Marietta, GA · Metro Atlanta

A 56-foot steel rooster towers over Cobb Parkway with a yellow beak that opens and shuts and eyes that roll, a roadside KFC sign that has marked the spot since 1963. Locals give directions by it and pilots reportedly used it as a visual checkpoint, and when storm damage nearly doomed it in 1993 the public outcry kept it standing. Pull in for a bucket and a photo under one of the South's most beloved pieces of programmatic architecture.

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Lunchbox Museum

Columbus, GA · Columbus

Allen Woodall bought his first lunch boxes, a Green Hornet and a Dick Tracy, at an Atlanta fairgrounds in 1985, and the obsession that followed now fills these walls with more than 3,500 metal lunch boxes and matching thermoses, the largest such collection in the world. Rows of Roy Rogers, the Beatles, Disney characters and Saturday-morning cartoons climb floor to ceiling, a tin-litho timeline of American childhood from the 1950s through the school cafeterias of the 1980s. It anchors the Columbus Collective Museums inside a restored 1946 warehouse, where you can handle some of the boxes rather than just look.

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Tubman Museum

Macon, GA · Middle Georgia

Founded in 1981 and named for Harriet Tubman, this is the largest museum in the Southeast devoted to African American art, history and culture, and since 2015 it has filled a 49,500-square-foot building on Cherry Street near old Terminal Station. Wilfred Stroud's sweeping mural From Africa to America traces the story from 1619 across an entire wall, while galleries move through fine art, local history and the heritage of Middle Georgia. Plan time for the rotating exhibitions and the dance, drumming and photography programming that keep the place busy year-round.

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First African Baptist Church

Savannah, GA · Savannah

Tracing its congregation to 1773, this brick sanctuary on Franklin Square was raised in 1859 by enslaved and free Black members who made the bricks by hand and laid them after their days in the fields. Look down on the lower-level floor and you find holes drilled in a Kongo diamond pattern, breathing air to freedom seekers hidden in the crawlspace beneath the pews. The balcony pews still carry marks read as West African script, and a guided tour walks you through the full weight of that history.

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Cathedral Basilica of St. John the Baptist

Savannah, GA · Savannah

The twin 207-foot spires of this 1876 French Gothic cathedral are the landmark you steer by all over downtown Savannah, rising white above Lafayette Square. Step inside and the nave opens into Italian stained glass, Persian-rug marble underfoot, and a series of murals tracing the life of John the Baptist across the apse and walls. Pope Francis raised it to a minor basilica in 2020, and sightseeing is welcome between Masses, with a self-guided tour that lets you read the windows panel by panel.

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Pin Point Heritage Museum

Savannah, GA · Savannah

Set inside the restored A.S. Varn and Son oyster and crab factory on the marsh at Moon River, this museum tells the story of Pin Point, a Gullah Geechee community that freed families founded here in 1890. Inside the white cinderblock packinghouse, oral histories and the original shucking tables trace generations who raked oysters and picked crab by hand until the cannery closed in 1985. It is also the boyhood community of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and the surrounding tidal creeks and live oaks still shape the place.

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Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum

Atlanta, GA · Metro Atlanta

Set on a rise that once held Sherman headquarters during the Battle of Atlanta, this presidential museum walks you through the Carter years and a post-presidency that won a Nobel Peace Prize. Step into a full-scale replica of the Oval Office as Carter kept it, then read the actual letters and decisions behind Camp David. The surrounding gardens and pond make the grounds a quiet stop in their own right, just off Freedom Park.

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Little White House

Warm Springs, GA · Columbus

Franklin Roosevelt built this modest pine cottage in 1932 and returned to it again and again to ease his polio in the nearby warm mineral springs, and it is where he died of a stroke on April 12, 1945. The rooms sit just as he left them, down to the Unfinished Portrait he was sitting for that morning, and the museum walks you through his Warm Springs years before the path leads to the small white house in the pines.

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Margaret Mitchell House

Atlanta, GA · Metro Atlanta

In a ground-floor apartment of this 1899 Tudor Revival house, then carved into ten units she wryly called The Dump, Margaret Mitchell typed most of Gone with the Wind between 1925 and 1932. Run by the Atlanta History Center, the restored Crescent Avenue building lets you stand in the cramped flat where the Pulitzer winner took shape and trace how a Jazz Age Atlanta reporter became one of the century's best-selling novelists. The exhibits hold the typewriter, manuscript pages, and the book's afterlife on screen, set against the story of the city that surrounds it.

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The Wren's Nest

Atlanta, GA · Metro Atlanta

In this Queen Anne Victorian in Atlanta's West End, journalist Joel Chandler Harris wrote the Uncle Remus tales that carried Br'er Rabbit and the briar patch into American folklore, adapted from the African American oral tradition he heard as a young man. The house is kept much as the Harris family left it, down to the porch where a wren once nested in the mailbox and gave the place its name. Time a visit for one of the live storytelling sessions, when those trickster tales are told aloud the way they were meant to be heard.

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Georgia State Capitol

Atlanta, GA · Metro Atlanta

The dome that gives Georgia politics its nickname is real gold leaf, hammered from Dahlonega ore mined an hour north where America had its first gold rush in the 1830s. Finished in 1889 and capped by the statue Miss Freedom, the building doubles as a free state museum, with flags, portraits, and a fourth-floor collection of Georgia minerals and Civil War relics open on weekdays. Walk the marble rotunda beneath the gilded dome, then step out onto Capitol Square where the working seat of state government meets a century-old monument.

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Tellus Science Museum

Cartersville, GA · Northwest Georgia

A Smithsonian-affiliate science museum off I-75 where a hall of full-size dinosaur skeletons gives way to a mineral gallery glittering with cut gems and raw crystals. Kids pan for gemstones and dig for shark teeth in the open-air Fossil Dig, then catch a show under the dome of the planetarium. The 120,000-square-foot building also keeps a hangar of vintage aircraft and a working observatory for weekend stargazing.

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Consolidated Gold Mine

Dahlonega, GA · North Georgia Mountains

Two decades before California, Benjamin Parks stubbed his boot on a gold-flecked rock here in 1828 and touched off America's first major gold rush. Today you strap on a hard hat and descend 200 feet into a genuine hard-rock mine, the largest gold operation that ever ran east of the Mississippi, where guides who actually worked underground walk you past glittering quartz veins at a steady 60 degrees. The roughly 40-minute tour ends back in daylight with a pan, a trough, and an award-winning panner teaching you to swirl real Georgia dirt down to the flash of color. It is touristy in the best way, and the kids leave with vials of gold and a story about the rush that built the town.

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Foxfire Museum & Appalachian Heritage Center

Mountain City, GA · North Georgia Mountains

This is the rare museum that grew out of a 1966 high school English class, when Rabun County students named their student-run magazine "Foxfire" after the glow-in-the-dark fungus and started interviewing their grandparents about cabin-building, moonshine and mountain medicine. Book royalties bought the land in 1974, and today you walk a half-mile trail through an eight-acre village of more than 20 relocated and reconstructed log buildings furnished with artifacts of Appalachian life from 1820 to 1940. Time your visit for live demonstrations and you might catch a blacksmith at the forge, a weaver at the loom or old-time music drifting between the cabins. Perched just below Black Rock Mountain State Park, it pairs naturally with a drive up to the state's highest overlooks.

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Lapham-Patterson House

Thomasville, GA · Southwest Georgia

Built in 1885 as a Chicago shoe magnate's winter cottage, this Queen Anne landmark is a National Historic Landmark loaded with deliberate oddities: a deck of fish-scale shingles, walls of stained glass, and close to 50 doors and exits, the legacy of an owner who survived the Great Chicago Fire and never wanted to feel trapped again. The whole house sits slightly askew so equinox light pours through the third floor, and a hexagonal room anchors a floor plan with almost no right angles. Friday and Saturday guided tours walk you through the long-leaf pine inlaid floors and the double-flue chimney that made it a marvel of its day.

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The Tree That Owns Itself

Athens, GA · Northeast Georgia

A white oak on a quiet residential corner that, by a deed first reported in 1890, legally owns itself and the ground within eight feet of its trunk, the gift of Colonel William H. Jackson who could not bear to see it cut down. The original tree fell in a 1942 windstorm at an estimated 400 years old, and the oak standing here now was grown from one of its own acorns and planted in 1946, so the city still recognizes its self-possession. A granite marker and a low chain-post fence set off the small plot it holds in its own name, an easy stop a few blocks off downtown.

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Expedition: Bigfoot, The Sasquatch Museum

Cherry Log, GA · North Georgia Mountains

Tucked along Highway 515 between Blue Ridge and Ellijay, this 4,000-square-foot shrine to Sasquatch claims the largest permanent collection of Bigfoot artifacts anywhere, and it does not pretend to be neutral about whether the big guy is real. Founded in 2016 by Navy veteran and Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization member David Bakara and his wife Malinda, it packs in wall after wall of footprint and handprint casts, sighting maps, hair samples, and listening stations piping out genuine recorded grunts and howls. You can settle into the Sasquatch Theater for looping eyewitness footage, gawk at the world's only Bigfoot research and tech ATV the Bakaras once drove on Florida investigations, and find a cast of a rare Bigfoot butt-print laid out on red velvet. Cap it with the gift shop, where David sells footprint casting kits he assembles himself.

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Stone Mountain Carving

Stone Mountain, GA · Metro Atlanta

Cut 42 feet deep into the north face of a granite dome, this is the largest high-relief carving in the world, spanning 190 feet of stone with Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson on horseback. Begun in 1923 and not finished until sculptor Roy Faulkner topped it off in 1972, the three-acre relief reads as a monument to the Lost Cause and the Klan revival that bankrolled its early years. You can take the cable car to the 1,683-foot summit for the long view, or stand in the lawn below as the nightly laser show plays across the figures.