Things to Do Across the Outer Banks, from Corolla to Ocracoke

Wright Brothers National Memorial: Kill Devil Hills

The National Park Service site marking Wilbur and Orville Wright's first four powered flights on December 17, 1903, was authorized by Congress in 1927 and formally designated a National Memorial in December 1953. Its centerpiece is a 60-foot granite monument atop 90-foot Kill Devil Hill, built between 1931 and 1932 and dedicated that December with roughly 1,000 people present, including Orville Wright himself. Small markers on the flat ground below the hill trace the actual distances of the four December 17 flights — the first covered just 120 feet, the last nearly 852 feet.

The visitor center (run by the NPS) houses a life-size reproduction of the 1903 Wright Flyer, a full-scale model of the Wrights' 1902 glider, and a reconstruction of the wind tunnel they built to test wing designs. The memorial drew 406,593 visitors in 2024, per NPS visitation figures, making it one of the most-visited single attractions on the Outer Banks.

Jockey’s Ridge State Park: Nags Head

North Carolina’s state parks agency describes Jockey’s Ridge as home to "the tallest living sand dune system on the Atlantic coast," and other regional tourism sources call it the largest natural sand dune on the East Coast — the dune field shifts constantly with the wind, so exact height figures move over time rather than staying fixed. The park covers 427 acres and includes a visitor center and museum, a 360-foot boardwalk with ecological exhibits, two self-guided nature trails, and picnic areas.

Hang gliding is the park's signature activity, taught by a private concessionaire licensed to operate on the dunes; kite flying, sandboarding, and barefoot hiking across the open sand are also common, and the dunes are a well-known spot for watching the sunset over the sound side of the island. A separate Soundside access area supports kiteboarding, windsurfing, and paddling. The park also marks the eastern terminus of North Carolina's Mountains-to-Sea State Trail.

Cape Hatteras Lighthouse and Its 1999 Relocation: Buxton

At 208 feet, Cape Hatteras Lighthouse is the tallest lighthouse in the United States, per the National Park Service, and its familiar black-and-white spiral — painted onto the brick tower in 1873, three years after the light was first lit in 1870 — makes it one of the most recognizable landmarks on the Atlantic coast. By 1970, shoreline erosion had brought the ocean to within about 120 feet of the tower, down from roughly 1,500 feet when it was built, forcing a decision between armoring the shoreline, letting the lighthouse fall, or moving it.

In the summer of 1999, the National Park Service moved the entire 4,830-ton brick structure 2,900 feet inland on steel tracks and roller dollies, lifted by hydraulic jacks and advanced five feet at a time under constant monitoring by roughly sixty sensors. The relocated lighthouse relit on November 13, 1999, and now sits about 1,600 feet from the water, with engineers at the time estimating roughly a century of protection from erosion at the new site.

Important for trip planning: as of this writing, the lighthouse is closed to public climbing for a multi-year National Park Service restoration project covering masonry repointing, metalwork, a new Fresnel lens, and repainting of the black-and-white daymark pattern. NPS project updates in 2026 describe the work as ongoing with completion likely extending into 2027; the surrounding grounds, keepers' quarters, museum, and gift shop remain open even while the tower itself is closed. Check the Cape Hatteras National Seashore's official lighthouse-climb page (nps.gov/caha) before planning a visit around climbing it.

Cape Hatteras National Seashore: America’s First National Seashore

Congress authorized Cape Hatteras National Seashore in 1937, and it was formally established as the first national seashore in the National Park System on January 12, 1953, with a dedication ceremony following in 1958. The seashore protects roughly 30,000 acres and more than 70 miles of barrier-island shoreline running from Bodie Island south through Hatteras Island to Ocracoke Island, encompassing the villages of Rodanthe, Waves, Salvo, Avon, Buxton, Frisco, Hatteras, and Ocracoke.

Three lighthouses stand within or immediately adjacent to the seashore — Bodie Island Lighthouse, Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, and Ocracoke Lighthouse — and the waters offshore are historically nicknamed the "Graveyard of the Atlantic" for the number of shipwrecks recorded there, a history documented at the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum in Hatteras village. Beyond the lighthouses, the seashore is largely undeveloped: soundside marshes, maritime forest, off-road-vehicle beaches (permit required), surf fishing access, and some of the best kiteboarding and windsurfing water on the East Coast at Canadian Hole near Buxton.

“The Lost Colony” Outdoor Drama: Roanoke Island

"The Lost Colony" is a real, continuously staged outdoor symphonic drama, written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paul Green and first performed in 1937 — making it the longest-running outdoor drama in the United States. It's staged at the Waterside Theatre inside Fort Raleigh National Historic Site in Manteo, on Roanoke Island, and dramatizes Sir Walter Raleigh's 1587 expedition and the 117 men, women, and children who vanished from the Roanoke colony without a confirmed explanation — the historical mystery the production takes its name from.

According to the production's own site, the 2026 season runs June 4 through August 22, marking its 89th year, with performances built around choreography, projections, and puppetry alongside the core script. Ticketed performances typically run several nights a week through the summer; confirm the current calendar and ticket prices directly at thelostcolony.org before planning a visit, since schedules shift year to year.

Elizabethan Gardens: Manteo

Next door to Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, the Elizabethan Gardens are a project of The Garden Club of North Carolina, built as a living memorial to the Roanoke colonists who lived on the same ground more than 400 years ago. The gardens combine formal, Elizabethan-era-inspired garden design with statuary and plantings meant to evoke the period the lost colonists would have known, and they operate as a standalone paid-admission attraction rather than a National Park Service site, even though they sit on land adjoining it. Combining a Gardens visit with Fort Raleigh and, in summer, an evening performance of "The Lost Colony," is a common way visitors spend a full day on this end of Roanoke Island.

Currituck Beach Lighthouse: Corolla

First lit December 1, 1875, Currituck Beach Lighthouse was the last major lighthouse built on the North Carolina Outer Banks, closing a roughly 40-mile dark stretch of coastline between the Cape Henry, Virginia, light and Bodie Island Light. At 162 feet tall and built from more than one million bricks, it's the only Outer Banks lighthouse left unpainted, which is precisely how it's distinguished at a glance from its black-and-white or striped counterparts. The lighthouse was automated in 1937, and after decades of Coast Guard operation, restoration and stewardship passed to the nonprofit Outer Banks Conservationists, Inc., which incorporated in 1980 and took full ownership of the site in 2003.

Visitors can climb the lighthouse's roughly 200-plus interior steps for a sound-to-sea view (accounts of the exact step count vary slightly by source), typically during the site's open season from mid-March through December. It anchors the roughly 39-acre Currituck Heritage Park, alongside the Whalehead Club and the Outer Banks Center for Wildlife Education.

Corolla’s Wild Horses

The wild horses on the northern Currituck Outer Banks are widely believed to descend from Spanish colonial mustangs brought to the coast in the 1500s, based on genetic and historical research cited by the nonprofit Corolla Wild Horse Fund; North Carolina has designated the Colonial Spanish Mustang the official state horse partly in recognition of this herd and its counterpart on Shackleford Banks farther south. Today the herd roams the undeveloped, four-wheel-drive-only beaches north of Corolla's paved road, in and around Carova — not the paved, developed part of Corolla where most vacation rentals sit.

The Corolla Wild Horse Fund manages the herd under an agreement with Currituck County, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, running daily 4x4 patrols and a rescue farm for horses that can no longer safely stay wild. Reporting on the herd (via annual helicopter counts) has put the population at roughly 100 horses in recent years, well below the 110-to-130 range wildlife managers consider a healthy target — confirm current numbers with the Fund directly, since counts change year to year. A Currituck County ordinance requires staying at least 50 feet from any horse; the responsible way to see them is a guided tour with a permitted operator, since untrained visitors driving the beach on their own risk both fines and harming the animals.

The Whalehead Club and Historic Corolla Village

The Whalehead Club (now generally marketed as "The Whalehead in Historic Corolla") is a roughly 21,000-square-foot Art Nouveau mansion built between 1922 and 1925 by Philadelphia industrialist Edward Collings Knight Jr. and his wife, Marie Louise LaBel Knight, as a private hunting retreat on what’s now called Corolla Island. Currituck County purchased and restored the property starting in 1992, and it now operates as a house museum with seasonal guided tours, sharing the same Currituck Heritage Park grounds as the Currituck Beach Lighthouse and the Outer Banks Center for Wildlife Education.

A short walk away, Historic Corolla Village preserves a small cluster of the settlement's original early-1900s buildings, including the Gray-Lewark House (built roughly 1896–1918) and the Parker House, now repurposed as shops, an artist cooperative, a bookstore, and the Corolla Wild Horse Museum. Together, the lighthouse, the Whalehead, and the village form the historic core of Corolla, spanning what local guides describe as a 100-plus-acre historic district built up over three very different eras of the settlement's history.