This week’s “featured city” at TheRealPlaces is Virginia Beach, Virginia. That means that it was next on our list for special attention, including adding, deleting, and cleaning up Virginia Beach’s most popular attractions. Beyond the resort area, the city of Virginia Beach is a very large place as a result of the combination of the town with Princess Anne County back in the 1960’s. So one of the “landmarks” we’ve added is the Virginia Beach Oceanfront, making it much easier to find hotels near the boardwalk along the Atlantic Ocean.
A short distance south of the resort area is the Virginia Aquarium and Marine Science Center, a very nice facility providing an opportunity to add some education to your beach vacation. If you’re a golfer visiting Virginia Beach, to the south is also where you’ll find the city’s newest golf courses, such as Virginia Beach National.
More education awaits to the north of the resort area. As you get close to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay you’ll find Fort Story and First Landing State Park at Cape Henry. (The cape is the place where the Jamestown colonists first came ashore after crossing the Atlantic.) There are a couple of old lighthouses at Fort Story and camping facilities at the state park.
One of the most popular entertainment venues in the region is the Verizon Wireless Virginia Beach Amphitheater. It can hold as many as 20,000 music fans under the roof and back on “the lawn”. The amphitheater is about 15 miles from the resort area, near the center of the city.
If you come into the resort area via I-264 you’ll probably notice Mount Trashmore (on the right side of the road about midway through the city), a popular park created on the site of a former landfill and one of the city’s most recognizable landmarks. One of the tallest, too. It’s a very flat town.
Find hotels throughout Virginia Beach and in nearby Norfolk and Chesapeake with our city hotel map.
