The Best Things to Do in Savannah for First-Timers, Repeat Visitors, and Highway Detour-ers

By Eric Barton | Dec. 9, 2025

AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.

I keep finding excuses to detour into Savannah. Sometimes it is a proper weekend; sometimes it is just a night on the way between Florida and North Carolina. Either way, I pull off the highway, park under some live oaks, and remember that this is one of the few cities where you can step outside your hotel and immediately feel like you have wandered onto a movie set.

At this point I have a ritual: a square to cross at dusk, a cemetery to wander when I want perspective, a restaurant or two to remind me that this is one of The South’s best restaurant scenes. Every visit I swap in something new—a museum, a park, a rooftop, a stretch of neighborhood I somehow missed before—and the list keeps getting better.

These are the things I’ve tested on too many trips to count, the best things to do in Savannah.

American Prohibition Museum

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If you like your history with props and a proper drink at the end, the American Prohibition Museum in City Market is the move. It bills itself as the only museum in the country devoted entirely to the Prohibition era, with galleries full of vintage cars, moonshine stills, wax figures, and animated exhibits that walk you from temperance rallies to speakeasies and rumrunners. The best part comes at the finale, when you step into Congress Street Up, a 1920s-style bar tucked inside the same complex, where costumed bartenders shake classic cocktails under low lights and jazz, and you suddenly understand why nobody stayed “dry” for long.

Best for: Anyone who thinks museums should come with a nightcap

Bonaventure Cemetery

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Bonaventure Cemetery is where Savannah’s prettiness tips into something stranger. Set on a bluff over the Wilmington River, this former plantation turned 160-acre cemetery is all live oaks, marble angels, and Spanish moss doing its best impression of a Hollywood set designer’s idea of the South. You wander past family plots and elaborate monuments, recognize names you have seen in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and realize this “graveyard” is weirdly full of life: birds in the trees, tours whispering past, and locals who treat it like a park with better sculpture.

Best for: Gothic scenery, long reflective walks, and finally understanding why everyone talks about that book

Forsyth Park

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Most trips to Savannah start or end for me with a lap around Forsyth Park, partly because it is on every postcard and partly because the postcards are right. This 30-acre stretch of green at the south end of the Historic District feels like a communal backyard, with joggers, dog walkers, kids on the playground, and locals cutting through like they own the place. I always end up at the 1850s fountain, still spraying away for wedding parties and selfie crews, before wandering past the oaks and open lawns long enough to forget I arrived here by car and not by century-old carriage.

Best for: Morning walks, fountain photos, and pretending this is your neighborhood park for a day

Ghost Tours

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Savannah’s ghost tours are where the city leans into its reputation. There’s on-foot tours with a guide in period costume, on a trolley rolling past lit-up squares, and even in those retrofitted “hearse” tours that feel like a Halloween ride gone semi-legit. But the basic premise is the same: walk through 300 years of fires, feuds, epidemics, and hauntings while someone tells you stories in the dark. While not the cheapest, Savannah Ghost Tours, at about a hundred bucks per person, is one of the most experienced operators in the city.

Best for: Nighttime storytelling, light scares, and seeing the Historic District at its creepiest and prettiest all at once

River Street

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River Street is Savannah at its most obvious and most complicated: a cobblestone waterfront lined with old cotton warehouses now crammed with T-shirt shops, praline counters, and frozen daiquiri bars you will absolutely regret later. It is also still where the city actually meets the water, with massive ships sliding by just offshore while you walk past brick arches, iron balconies, and a handful of bars and restaurants that feel more like Savannah than spring-break backdrop. I treat it like a choose-your-own-adventure: thread your way past the worst tourist traps, duck into an older tavern or a quiet side alley, then end up on the steps with a drink in hand, watching the river do its slow, unbothered thing.

Best for: Ship-watching, people-watching, and embracing the tourist zone without losing the plot

SCAD Museum of Art

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When I need a break from live oaks and ghost stories, I duck into the SCAD Museum of Art and let somebody else’s imagination do the work for a while. Housed in a restored 19th-century railroad complex just west of the Historic District, it is a teaching museum for Savannah College of Art and Design students that doubles as one of the city’s best contemporary art stops, with rotating shows in fashion, photography, sculpture, and whatever else the curators are obsessed with that quarter. You get big-name international artists and emerging voices sharing the same hallways, plus plenty of students wandering through with sketchbooks, which makes the whole place feel less like a hushed gallery and more like a working lab for ideas.

Best for: Art in the AC, and remembering Savannah is a college town

Starland District & Starland Yard

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Once you have done your time in the Historic District, head a bit south and let Starland show you the newer version of Savannah. What started as a scruffy cluster of warehouses and the old Starland Dairy has turned into the city’s creative engine, with murals, record shops, galleries, vintage stores, and spots like Foxy Loxy Cafe—part coffee shop, part bakery, part Tex-Mex wine bar—keeping the sidewalks busy well into the night. At the center of it all is Starland Yard, a food park built from shipping containers and string lights, with a full bar, rotating food trucks, and Neapolitan pies coming out of Pizzeria Vittoria while kids, dogs, and SCAD students all try to claim the same picnic tables.

Best for: Casual nights out, grazing from food trucks