Biloxi Attractions: Every Place Worth Finding, and Where It Sits

The editorial score behind the ranking is ours and it is not a popularity measure. Three things push a place up it.

Does it explain something? The Maritime and Seafood Industry Museum ranks high not because it is large but because an hour there makes the rest of the coast readable: why the harbour is where it is, why the schooners were rigged that way, who is on the boats now. The Katrina Memorial does the same job in twenty minutes.

Is it unrepeatable? A Frank Gehry campus built to hold the pots of a self-described mad potter exists in exactly one place. A cast-iron lighthouse standing between four lanes of traffic exists in exactly one place. A casino floor does not, and the casino resorts rank where they do because what is distinctive about them here is the law that shaped them rather than the gaming.

Does it hold up on the day? Weather, season and access all count. Ship Island is the best thing in this pack for seven and a half months of the year and entirely unavailable for the other four and a half, so the score carries that caveat rather than hiding it.

What pushes a place down: entry that depends on an unpublished schedule, a view that is better from the road than from inside, and anything whose interest is entirely in what used to be there.

The Biloxi Lighthouse is the city's symbol and its strangest sight. Cast iron, first lit in 1848, a bit over sixty feet tall, and standing in the median of US 90 with two lanes of traffic passing on either side. The road was built around it rather than the other way round. It came through Katrina standing, though the brick lining inside was badly damaged and needed rebuilding. Climbing tours are ticketed and run from the visitors centre across the road; the schedule changes, so ask there rather than turning up.

The Biloxi Visitors Center, on the north side of the highway immediately opposite, is more useful than visitor centres usually are: it is the ticket point for the lighthouse and the best place on the coast to get a straight answer about what is currently running.

The Katrina Memorial stands on the Town Green a short walk away and carries a hundred and seventy names. It costs nothing, it takes twenty minutes, and it changes how the rest of the waterfront reads.

Keesler Federal Park is the downtown ballpark, opened in June 2015 as MGM Park and renamed in 2023. It seats around six thousand, and the Biloxi Shuckers play there in the Double-A Southern League as a Milwaukee Brewers affiliate. A summer evening game is one of the cheapest good nights in the city and the ballpark sits within walking distance of the casino strip, which is not a sentence you can write about many minor-league parks.

Keep driving east until the peninsula ends and you arrive at the part of Biloxi that is still doing what Biloxi was famous for. Almost nobody staying on the strip makes the five-minute trip.

The Maritime and Seafood Industry Museum covers three centuries of working this water: oyster and shrimp canning, net making, wooden boat building, the hurricanes, and the arrival from the late 1970s of the Vietnamese-American fleet that by the end of the 1980s accounted for roughly half of Mississippi's shrimpers. It is the single best hour of explanation available on this coast.

The Biloxi Schooners are kept at the pier beside it. The Glenn L. Swetman and the Mike Sekul are replicas of the two-masted working boats that dredged the oyster reefs under sail into the early twentieth century, and they are named after men who built and ran the originals. The museum sails them and offers public trips seasonally; the pattern changes, so ask rather than assume.

The Biloxi Small Craft Harbor is the working basin, free to walk around, and best in the early morning or the late afternoon when boats are moving, ice is going aboard and nets are being mended on the dock.

Point Cadet itself is the neighbourhood, and it is where the Vietnamese-American community that reshaped the fleet settled. Come hungry.

The Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art is the most architecturally significant building on the Mississippi coast and it was built for a potter almost nobody bought from in his lifetime. George Ohr, who advertised himself as the Mad Potter of Biloxi, threw walls thinner than his contemporaries thought physically possible and then crumpled, folded and pinched them while the clay was still wet. He died in 1918 with thousands of pieces unsold in storage. Frank Gehry designed the campus that now holds them as a scatter of metal-skinned pods set among live oaks rather than one building, and walking between them is half the visit. Published visiting hours at the time of writing are Tuesday to Saturday with adult admission around twelve dollars. Check before you drive over.

Beauvoir sits further west on the beach road and needs stating plainly. It was the last home of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, and it operates today as a house museum with a presidential library and a Confederate cemetery on the grounds. The interpretation offered at sites of this kind is genuinely contested, and visitors have found the framing of the Confederacy and of slavery here to sit well apart from mainstream historical scholarship. The house itself is a rare and unaltered example of a raised Gulf Coast cottage, and the grounds tell you a lot about how this shoreline was built on and what the 2005 surge did to it. Go if the subject interests you, go informed, and treat the interpretation as part of what you are examining rather than as settled fact.

The main house is reached by a broad exterior stair, so settle access questions while you are still planning.

Ship Island is the headline. About twelve miles out in the Sound, part of Gulf Islands National Seashore, reachable only by boat, and the place where the water finally turns the colour the brochures promised. The public ferry sails from Gulfport's Jones Park, takes roughly an hour each way, and runs from the middle of March to the end of October with a thinner pattern outside high summer.

Fort Massachusetts stands near the landing on West Ship Island. Construction began in 1857, the fort was held by Union forces through the Civil War, and it is now maintained by the National Park Service with guided programmes and passport stamps in season. Brick casemates, a parade ground, and the Gulf on the other side of a long boardwalk.

Gulf Islands National Seashore takes in Horn, Petit Bois and Cat islands as well. Horn and Petit Bois are designated wilderness with no facilities and no scheduled public boat, so getting there is a charter or your own hull.

Deer Island lies a few hundred yards off the Biloxi shore and reads from the beach road as an uninhabited green ridge. It is state-owned conservation land, it has no ferry and no facilities, and it is a kayak or small-boat trip rather than a day out.

One geological note that changes how you read the map: Hurricane Camille cut Ship Island in two in 1969, and the Corps of Engineers closed that breach in 2019. The island is a repaired one.

Ocean Springs is fifteen minutes east over the Biloxi Bay Bridge and has the best walkable downtown on the Mississippi coast by a distance: Washington Avenue and the streets either side of it, low buildings, live oaks, galleries and kitchens rather than chain frontage. Treat it as an evening rather than a detour.

The Walter Anderson Museum of Art is the reason to go even if you would not otherwise cross a bridge for a gallery. Anderson rowed alone out to Horn Island for weeks at a time to draw what lived there, and the museum, dedicated in May 1991, holds the result. Two things are unmissable: the Little Room, a small space he painted entirely for himself and which was only discovered after his death in 1965, and the roughly three thousand square feet of murals he painted for the Ocean Springs Community Center next door.

Gulfport is thirteen miles west and holds two things you will want. Jones Park at the harbour is where the Ship Island ferry sails from. And the Mississippi Aquarium on East Beach Boulevard opened on 29 August 2020, deliberately on the fifteenth anniversary of Katrina, on a site where an earlier marine facility had been destroyed by the storm. It runs to about six acres with dolphins, otters, alligators and an underwater viewing tunnel, and it is the strongest wet-weather option on the coast.

Pass Christian, further west again, is a quieter old harbour town with an oyster history of its own and a shoreline that gives you the Sound without the casino frontage.