The best Ocean Springs attractions reveal why this small Mississippi Gulf Coast town feels so different from a typical beach destination. Within a few miles, you can taste your way through a walkable downtown, encounter the extraordinary art of Walter Anderson, visit a nearly century-old family pottery, wander beneath live oaks, explore a national seashore, and reach the water before sunset. For first-time visitors, these are the experiences that offer the best introduction to Ocean Springs.
Ocean Springs is compact enough that sightseeing rarely feels like a day spent driving between attractions. Downtown restaurants, galleries, museums, shops, parks, and the waterfront sit remarkably close together, while some of the area’s best nature experiences are only a short drive away.
Rather than trying to see everything, first-time visitors should focus on the places that tell different pieces of the Ocean Springs story: its food, art, history, natural landscape, and relationship with the Mississippi Sound. These Ocean Springs attractions are the places I would start.
1. Original Downtown Ocean Springs Food Tour
For a first visit, few experiences introduce as many sides of Ocean Springs at once as a guided walking food tour. The Original Downtown Ocean Springs Food Tour combines tastings from local restaurants with the history, art, architecture, and personalities that have shaped downtown. Instead of simply arriving somewhere for lunch, you spend the afternoon moving through the community and learning what you are looking at along the way.
The variety is part of the appeal. Guests sample multiple local favorites rather than choosing a single restaurant, and the walk between stops gives the experience the feel of both a city tour and a progressive meal. It is especially useful early in a trip because you finish with a much better sense of downtown—and usually several restaurants, shops, and places you want to revisit on your own.
2. Walter Anderson Museum of Art
The Walter Anderson Museum of Art is more than one of the premier cultural attractions in Ocean Springs. It provides a lens through which much of the rest of the town begins to make sense. Walter Inglis Anderson filled his work with the birds, plants, insects, people, islands, weather, and landscapes of the Gulf Coast, often observing the natural world with almost obsessive intensity.
One of the experiences first-time visitors should not rush is the Ocean Springs Community Center, where Anderson’s sweeping mural surrounds the room with imagery inspired by the Coast. The museum also presents rotating exhibitions alongside its permanent collection, so there is often something new even for returning visitors.
When you step back outside afterward, pay attention to the live oaks, pelicans, vegetation, and water around town. There is a good chance you will see them differently.
3. Historic Downtown Ocean Springs
Downtown Ocean Springs is less a single attraction than the connective tissue between many of them. Historic buildings, sprawling live oaks, independent shops, galleries, cafés, restaurants, bars, and small surprises sit within a district that is unusually pleasant to explore on foot. The official local tourism bureau continues to promote downtown specifically for its walkability and concentration of locally owned businesses.
Do not over-plan this part of the visit. Walk Washington Avenue and Government Street, follow whatever storefront catches your eye, step into a gallery, stop for coffee, and leave enough room in the afternoon for an unplanned discovery. Ocean Springs is a place where wandering is part of the attraction.
If you are trying to decide where to eat while exploring, our guide to the best restaurants in Ocean Springs is a useful companion.
4. Front Beach and Fort Maurepas Park
One of the things first-time visitors often underestimate is how close downtown sits to the shoreline. Front Beach gives you an easy way to transition from restaurants and shops to open views across the Mississippi Sound without dedicating an entire day to a beach excursion. Walk beside the water, bring something to eat, watch the boats, or time your visit for late afternoon when the light begins to change over the Sound.
Across the street, Fort Maurepas Park makes this one of the most useful Ocean Springs attractions for families. The city currently lists a playground, splash pad, pavilion, picnic areas, stage, restrooms, and parking among the park’s amenities. It is an easy place to let children play while everyone else enjoys the waterfront.
Ocean Springs actually has two public beaches, Front Beach and East Beach. If sand and water are a bigger part of your plans, see our complete guide to Ocean Springs beaches.
5. Shearwater Pottery
Shearwater Pottery is one of those rare attractions where history is not sitting behind glass—it is still being made. Peter Anderson founded the pottery in 1928 with the support of his family, and generations of the Anderson family have continued producing art pottery, functional ware, figurines, tiles, and other ceramic pieces on the property.
The experience feels appropriately understated for Ocean Springs. Follow the road into the wooded property and visit the showroom, where individual pieces display glazes, shapes, and imagery strongly connected to the Gulf Coast. The pottery’s current website still encourages visitors to make the trip to the showroom, where one-of-a-kind pieces and changing glazes may be available.
Visit after the Walter Anderson Museum if possible. Together, the two places make the Anderson family’s enormous influence on Ocean Springs much easier to understand.
6. Davis Bayou at Gulf Islands National Seashore
Drive a few minutes away from downtown and Ocean Springs changes character completely. The Davis Bayou Area of Gulf Islands National Seashore protects the quieter coastal environment surrounding the city, with bayous, marsh, forest, trails, and wildlife replacing storefronts and restaurant patios.
The National Park Service currently lists trails, boardwalks, a boat launch, campground, visitor center, picnic areas, and places to overlook the bayous. The William M. Colmer Visitor Center adds exhibits, a park film, an observation deck, and National Park passport stamps for travelers who collect them.
You do not need to be an avid hiker to enjoy Davis Bayou. A short walk and some time watching the water can be enough. It is the contrast with downtown that makes the experience so valuable: this is the natural environment that has inspired Ocean Springs artists, fishermen, cooks, and storytellers for generations.
7. The Mary C. O’Keefe Cultural Arts Center
The Mary C gives visitors another way to understand how deeply art is woven into everyday life in Ocean Springs. The Mary C. O’Keefe Cultural Arts Center occupies the historic 1927 Ocean Springs Public School building and continues to operate as an active center for galleries, classes, performances, exhibitions, and community events.
The building currently houses two local art galleries along with the History of Ocean Springs Museum and the Senator Trent Lott Performing Arts Theater. Depending on when you visit, you may also find a concert, open studio, theater performance, class, market, or other event underway.
Even when there is no major event on the calendar, it is worth seeing how an old public school has been adapted into one of the community’s creative gathering places.
8. The Pink Rooster & Gallery Garbo
One of downtown’s most distinctive gallery experiences occupies a hundred-year-old estate home on Washington Avenue. The Pink Rooster & Gallery Garbo remains active and currently represents local, national, and international artists working in painting, pottery, jewelry, glass, and other media.
The house itself gives the visit personality. Artwork fills rooms rather than hanging in an austere museum environment, creating the feeling of browsing someone’s unusually interesting private collection. It is an approachable stop even if you have no intention of buying anything, and an excellent place to see how Ocean Springs’ arts culture extends beyond its museum.
For visitors taking the Downtown Food Tour, Pink Rooster may also feel familiar: the gallery is often incorporated as a cultural stop along the walking route between tastings.
9. Ocean Springs Fresh Market
If your first visit includes a Saturday morning, make room for the Ocean Springs Fresh Market. This is less about seeing a formal tourist attraction and more about seeing the community doing something it actually does every week. Growers, food producers, bakers, makers, residents, and visitors gather around the historic L&N Depot Plaza in the heart of downtown.
The Ocean Springs Chamber’s current 2026 calendar confirms that the Fresh Market continues every Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., rain or shine. Browse without a shopping list, find something to snack on, talk with vendors, and then continue directly into downtown for the rest of the day.
Because the market is seasonal in what vendors bring even though it operates throughout the year, no two Saturday mornings are quite identical.
10. Walk or Bike the Biloxi Bay Bridge
The Biloxi Bay Bridge is easy to think of only as the road connecting Ocean Springs and Biloxi. Get out of the car, however, and it becomes one of the area’s best viewpoints. The pedestrian and bicycle route climbs high enough above the bay to provide broad views across the water, back toward Ocean Springs, and west toward Biloxi.
You do not have to cross the entire bridge to enjoy it. Walk until the view feels worth the effort, stop for photographs, and head back toward Front Beach. More active travelers can incorporate the bridge into a longer waterfront walk or bicycle ride.
Summer visitors should strongly favor morning or evening. There is little shade once you are on the bridge, and the Coast is much more enjoyable when you are not trying to prove something to the midday sun.
Bonus: Tato-Nut Donut Shop
Some Ocean Springs attractions are museums or historic sites. Others are places that have simply become part of the town’s identity. Tato-Nut Donut Shop firmly belongs in the second category. The family-owned Government Street institution has been serving Ocean Springs since 1960, and generations of locals and visitors have made a stop here part of the ritual of being downtown.
The signature Tato-Nut is famously made with potato flour, giving the doughnuts a character all their own. The Original Glazed is the obvious place to begin, but part of the fun is seeing what is fresh in the case when you arrive. Lines are not unusual, especially in the morning, and that steady mix of regulars and travelers is part of the experience rather than something to avoid.
If you are spending a morning in downtown Ocean Springs, Tato-Nut makes an easy first stop before shopping, visiting the Walter Anderson Museum, or heading toward the beach. It is inexpensive, unmistakably local, and one of those places visitors tend to mention long after the trip is over. Current listings show the shop actively operating in 2026, though hours and sellout times can vary, so checking before you go is worthwhile.
How to Experience Ocean Springs Attractions
The easiest mistake first-time visitors make is trying to turn Ocean Springs into a checklist. You can certainly visit several attractions in one day, but the town is better when you leave enough time between them to notice what connects everything together.
Start downtown with a food tour or Walter Anderson. Wander through the shops and galleries afterward. Walk down to Front Beach. Give another half-day to Shearwater and Davis Bayou. If Saturday falls during your trip, begin at the Fresh Market and let the rest of the day develop from there.
Most importantly, leave room for lunch that runs long, a gallery you had not intended to enter, or a sunset that changes your evening plans. The best Ocean Springs attractions introduce you to the city, but the unscheduled moments between them are often what make people want to return.
Continue planning with our guides to the best restaurants in Ocean Springs, the best art galleries of Ocean Springs, the best time to visit Ocean Springs, and the best places to stay in Ocean Springs.