Martha's Vineyard

Top things to do in Martha's Vineyard

1. 01

   Aquinnah Cliffs and Gay Head Light - the clay headland at the western end

   scenic history 👍 Popular

   The island's one genuinely dramatic landform: a wall of banded clay in red, ochre, grey and white, laid down and then shoved into place by the ice, dropping straight into the sea at the far western tip. The overlook and the shops above it are Wampanoag tribal land, the brick lighthouse behind them was winched back from the crumbling edge in 2015, and Moshup Beach below is reached by a walk down from the road. The cliffs themselves are protected, so climbing them or carrying the clay away is out.

2. 02

   Oak Bluffs Campground - the gingerbread cottages and the Tabernacle

   history culture arts 👍 Popular

   A Methodist camp meeting pitched its tents in an oak grove here in the 1830s, the tents hardened into wooden cottages, and the result is several hundred tiny houses in candy colours with fretwork trim, packed shoulder to shoulder along curling lanes around an open iron tabernacle. People still own and summer in them, so you wander a living neighbourhood rather than a museum, and on one August night the whole campground is hung with paper lanterns.

3. 03

   Menemsha - the fish shacks and the sunset off the jetty

   food scenic ⭐ Highly recommended

   A genuinely working fishing harbour in Chilmark, all weathered grey shingle, lobster pots and draggers unloading, where the ritual is to buy lobster, chowder or oysters straight off the counter at one of the fish markets, carry it down to the beach and eat it watching the sun go into Vineyard Sound. It is the one part of the island that faces properly west, and the shack Quint kept in Jaws stood here.

4. 04

   Edgartown - the whaling captains' houses and the harbour light

   history scenic

   The island's oldest and most polished town, where the money from a nineteenth-century whaling fleet went into white Greek Revival houses with black shutters that still line Main and North Water Streets, along with the Old Whaling Church and a shingled clutch of galleries and inns. A small cast-iron lighthouse sits out on its own beach at the harbour mouth, a few minutes' walk from the town centre, and the yacht-heavy harbour is the sort you can walk right around.

5. 05

   Joseph Sylvia State Beach and the Jaws Bridge - the calm sound-side strand

   scenic history 👍 Popular

   The long, easy beach on the road between Oak Bluffs and Edgartown, backed by Sengekontacket Pond and facing north into the sound, so the water is flat, shallow and much warmer than the Atlantic side. Halfway along is the small bridge over the channel that appears in Jaws, and jumping off it into the tidal current is an island rite of passage that the police periodically discourage.

6. 06

   South Beach at Katama - the Atlantic surf side

   scenic adventure

   Three miles of open, south-facing ocean beach below Edgartown, with real waves, a serious shore break and a strong lateral current, which is exactly why the island's teenagers and body-surfers go there instead of the sound. Lifeguards cover only part of the strand, the water stays cold well into the summer, and a paved bike path runs down to it from town across the Katama plain.

7. 07

   The island bike paths - three harbours, the state beach and the plain to Katama

   scenic adventure ⭐ Highly recommended

   Flat, paved and genuinely useful rather than merely recreational: paths link Vineyard Haven, Oak Bluffs and Edgartown along the shore road and the state beach, run south across the Katama plain to the ocean, and push up-island as far as the Ag Hall. Rental shops sit by all three ferry landings, and on a summer weekday the bike is simply faster than the car it saves you shipping over. Up-island roads are another matter, hilly, narrow and shoulderless.

8. 08

   Flying Horses Carousel - grabbing for the brass ring

   history culture arts

   The oldest operating platform carousel in the country, built in 1876 and shipped over from Coney Island in the 1880s, still turning in a plain hall at the top of Circuit Avenue. The horses have real horsehair manes and glass eyes with tiny animals set inside them, and riders on the outside row still lean out to snatch rings from a dispenser, with a brass one somewhere in the run winning a free go.

9. 09

   Oak Bluffs' Inkwell and the Highlands - the Black summer colony

   history culture arts

   Black families have summered in Oak Bluffs since the late nineteenth century, first in the Highlands above the harbour where an early guesthouse took visitors barred from the hotels, and the community that grew from it is one of the oldest of its kind in the United States. Its centre is the town beach long known as the Inkwell, a name reclaimed as a badge, and the walking and the plaques around the Highlands fill in the rest.

10. 10

    Polly Hill Arboretum - a plant collector's field in West Tisbury

    nature wildlife

    Sixty-odd acres of former sheep farm where Polly Hill spent decades raising trees and shrubs from seed, refusing to coddle anything that could not take the island's wind and salt. The result is an unusually relaxed arboretum of magnolias, stewartias, hollies and a monkey puzzle, laid out through meadow and stone wall rather than beds, and it is one of the quietest places on the island in August.

11. 11

    West Tisbury's Agricultural Hall - the farmers market and Alley's store

    food culture arts

    The rural centre of the island: a timber-framed agricultural hall that hosts a long-running summer farmers market of island produce, oysters, flowers and bread, and across the road a general store trading since the 1850s under a sign promising dealers in almost everything, with a porch that functions as the up-island noticeboard. The island's agricultural fair fills the same grounds in late summer.

12. 12

    Long Point and the up-island reservations - sandplain, ponds and empty sea

    nature wildlife scenic

    The conservation holdings are the reason the island still has quiet: rare sandplain grassland and heath at Long Point in West Tisbury, with a walk over the dune to an all but empty south-shore beach, plus salt ponds, oak woods and shorebird flats at reservations scattered up-island. Access is by narrow sand roads and the parking is deliberately small, which is the whole design.

13. 13

    Martha's Vineyard Museum - the island story and the Gay Head lens

    history culture arts

    Housed in a converted marine hospital on the hill above Vineyard Haven harbour, with a view down over the boats. It covers the Wampanoag island, the whaling fleet, the camp meeting and the summer people, and its single great object is the enormous first-order Fresnel lens that once turned in the Gay Head Light, a beehive of prisms far bigger than visitors expect.

14. 14

    Vineyard Haven harbour - wooden boats and the working waterfront

    culture arts history

    The island's year-round port keeps a boatyard culture the resort towns do not: wooden schooners and gaff-rigged sloops on moorings, a yard that still designs and builds them by hand on the harbour edge, and a shipwright trade that draws classic boats in from all over New England in the warm months. Main Street behind it is the one shopping street on the island that stays open through the winter.

15. 15

    Katama Airfield - biplane rides off the grass

    adventure scenic

    A grass airstrip on the Katama plain behind South Beach, claimed as the oldest continuously operating grass airfield in the country, where open-cockpit biplanes take passengers up over the ponds, the cliffs and the barrier beach in leather helmets. There is a diner at the edge of the field, and even if you never fly it is a good place to sit and watch small aircraft bounce in over the dunes.

Getting to & around Martha's Vineyard

Know before you go