Start from 42 curated places around Myrtle Beach, SC, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
Sea Captain's House
A 1962 oceanfront dining room in a converted 1930s beach house — same family, same fireplace in the lounge, and the she-crab soup that locals still consider the Grand Strand benchmark. Breakfast on the ocean porch is the visit most regulars schedule.
Hook & Barrel Restaurant
A sustainability-driven kitchen on Restaurant Row from a James Beard-nominated chef — Carolina-coastal cooking, certified-green operations, and a wine list that actually pairs with the seafood instead of fighting it. The off-strip dinner reservation locals actually fight for.
Trails & outdoors
Myrtle Beach State Park
A 312-acre park inside city limits — one of the few stretches of longleaf-pine maritime forest left in the Grand Strand, plus a fishing pier, dune walkovers, and a one-mile sculptured-oak nature trail through the woods. The local-park morning walk the strip never sees.
Huntington Beach State Park
Twin to Myrtle Beach State Park but bigger and with the marsh complex — a salt marsh boardwalk, an alligator pond at the causeway, and Atalaya the Moorish-Revival castle ruin at the south end. Three miles of beach, three habitats, one parking sticker.
Things to do
Ripley's Aquarium of Myrtle Beach
The Grand Strand's go-to rainy-day plan — Dangerous Reef glass tunnel with sharks and rays gliding overhead, a touch tank of horseshoe crabs and small rays, and a mermaid show four times daily. The setup the Carolina kids leave most-quoted.
SkyWheel Myrtle Beach
The 187-foot Ferris wheel at the south end of the boardwalk — 42 climate-controlled gondolas, a 10-minute ride, and the highest open view of the Grand Strand. The night ride is the postcard photo of the LED-skirted wheel from the boardwalk below.
Landmarks & sights
Brookgreen Gardens
A 9,100-acre garden and outdoor-sculpture park on a former indigo and rice plantation south of Murrells Inlet — the largest collection of American figurative sculpture anywhere, set among live-oak allees and old rice trunks. The Lowcountry Zoo inside the gates is a quiet bonus the brochure undersells.
Huntington Beach State Park
Across the highway from Brookgreen, a 2,500-acre state park built on Archer Huntington's old beachfront estate — three miles of empty beach, a salt marsh boardwalk, an alligator pond at the entrance, and Atalaya, the 1930s Moorish-revival winter home crumbling in slow motion at the south end.