Things to Do in Roanoke Island, NC: Manteo & Wanchese

The Lost Colony — a 1937 Outdoor Drama, Still Running

"The Lost Colony," the outdoor drama written by Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Green, was founded in 1937 and is still running today -- its 88th season staged in 2025 at the Waterside Theatre, inside Fort Raleigh National Historic Site on the north end of Roanoke Island. Nearly nine decades of continuous seasonal performances is a real, confirmable run, not marketing language, and it makes this one of the longest-running outdoor dramas in the country.

Worth correcting directly, since a recurring error shows up across tourism and enthusiast content: the drama depicts the 1587 colony under John White -- the group whose disappearance and Virginia Dare's birth are the actual "Lost Colony" story -- not the earlier, separate 1585 Ralph Lane military expedition. Content that simply says the island was "settled in 1585" is conflating two distinct expeditions two years apart. If you're visiting specifically for the Lost Colony story, the drama and Fort Raleigh's exhibits are telling the 1587 story.

Elizabethan Gardens — Ten Acres, a 99-Year Lease, Opened 1960

Elizabethan Gardens sits next to Fort Raleigh and traces to a concept first raised in 1950; ground was broken on June 2, 1953, and the roughly 10-acre garden formally opened on August 18, 1960. It was built and is sponsored by the Garden Club of North Carolina, operating under a 99-year lease from the Roanoke Island Historical Association -- a genuinely long-term civic commitment behind what looks, on a visit, like a simple ornamental garden.

The landscape design, by the firm Innocenti & Webel, incorporates Italian Renaissance statuary sourced from the Whitney Estate, which is part of what gives the gardens a formal, historic character distinct from a typical municipal park. It pairs naturally with a Fort Raleigh or Lost Colony visit given the shared address and shared 400th-anniversary-era history.

NC Aquarium on Roanoke Island — 280,000+ Visitors a Year

The North Carolina Aquarium on Roanoke Island, at 374 Airport Road in Manteo on Croatan Sound, was founded in 1976 as the North Carolina Marine Resources Center, alongside sister sites at Pine Knoll Shores and Fort Fisher, and was renamed the North Carolina Aquariums in 1986. A major expansion completed in 2000 and the STAR Center's 2014 construction (with a further renovation in 2016) brought the site to its current AZA-accredited scale.

It draws more than 280,000 visitors annually, making it one of the higher-traffic attractions on the island. As with the other sites here, it's a genuine, decades-old public institution rather than a seasonal tourist add-on -- worth building into any Roanoke Island visit alongside the historic sites just up the road.

Roanoke Island Festival Park and the Elizabeth II Replica

Roanoke Island Festival Park was established as a North Carolina State Historic Site on July 13, 1984, tied directly to the 400th-anniversary commemoration of the English colonists' arrival. Its centerpiece, the Elizabeth II, is a 69-foot, three-masted barque replica with an 8-foot draft, launched in 1983 for that same anniversary -- a hands-on, walkable piece of the same history the Lost Colony drama and Fort Raleigh tell.

Between Festival Park, Fort Raleigh, Elizabethan Gardens, and the Aquarium, downtown Manteo carries a genuinely unusual concentration of verified historic and cultural attractions for a town this size, almost all of it clustered within a short walk or drive of the waterfront.

The Mother Vine — an Old Scuppernong Vine, "Possibly" the Oldest

The Mother Vine, a scuppernong grapevine estimated at roughly 400 years old, grows on Roanoke Island and is frequently pitched as the oldest cultivated grapevine in the country. That claim is worth holding at arm's length rather than repeating as settled fact: even the most detailed sourcing found on it hedges the superlative as "possibly" the oldest, not a verified record. Treat its age and its place in the island's history as real, and treat the "oldest" title as an unverified claim rather than a confirmed one.