Places to go in Savannah.

Savannah, Tybee Island, the coast. 11 places worth the drive in this corner of Georgia.

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11 places

Forests

Skidaway Island State Park

Savannah, GA · Savannah

Six miles southeast of downtown Savannah, this 588-acre park sits right on Skidaway Narrows, where the Intracoastal Waterway threads past tidal creeks and spartina salt marsh. Its trails run through live-oak maritime forest out to boardwalks and an observation tower, and you can count on fiddler crabs scuttling the mudflats, egrets stalking the shallows, and deer slipping through the palmettos. Eighty-seven campsites plus cabins and yurts make it an easy basecamp for the Georgia coast.

Lakes & rivers

Fort McAllister State Park

Richmond Hill, GA · Savannah

The best-preserved earthwork fort the Confederacy left behind sits on a bluff where the Ogeechee River widens toward the sea, its grassy ramparts and Columbiad cannons shaded by live oaks dripping Spanish moss. Union ironclads shelled it seven times without breaking through; it finally fell in December 1864 when Sherman's infantry stormed the works in fifteen minutes and ended the March to the Sea. Today you walk the mounds and bombproofs, cast for redfish off the fishing pier, and camp among the marsh and oaks ten miles south of Savannah.

Attractions

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.

Attractions

Bonaventure Cemetery

Savannah, GA · Savannah

Live oaks draped in Spanish moss arch over more than a hundred acres on a bluff above the Wilmington River, shading a Victorian gallery of marble angels and weathered family plots that has drawn visitors since the 1840s. Toys, coins, and flowers still pile against the iron fence around Little Gracie Watson, the six-year-old whose 1889 statue is the most-visited grave here. The grounds gained wider fame through Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, but the quiet and the canopy are the real reason to walk it slowly.

Attractions

Savannah Historic District

Savannah, GA · Savannah

Laid out by James Oglethorpe in 1733, this is the original walking city: 22 leafy public squares strung through a grid of cast-iron balconies, moss-draped live oaks, and antebellum townhouses, now one of the largest National Historic Landmark districts in the country. The squares pull you from one to the next on foot, ending at Forsyth Park where a white 1858 fountain anchors thirty acres of shade. Time it for late afternoon, when the Spanish moss goes gold and the brick sidewalks empty out.

Attractions

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.

Attractions

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.

Attractions

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.

Attractions

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.

Attractions

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.

Attractions

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.