First Landing and the Cypress Swamp at Sea Level

First Landing and the Cypress Swamp at Sea Level

First Landing State Park sits at the northern tip of Virginia Beach, where the Chesapeake Bay meets the Atlantic — the same spot where the Jamestown colonists made their first landfall in 1607. The park is 2,888 acres of maritime forest, dunes, and cypress swamp, and it exists because the Navy decided in the 1930s that this particular stretch of coastline was worth protecting, which may be the best decision any military branch has ever made about a beach.

The Bald Cypress Nature Trail is the park's masterpiece — a 1.5-mile loop on boardwalk and sand through a swamp that looks like it belongs in Louisiana, not coastal Virginia. Bald cypress trees rise from black water, their knobby knees breaking the surface like wooden fists, and the Spanish moss that drapes their branches filters the light into a green-gold haze that makes the entire swamp feel like an underwater cathedral.

The trail transitions from swamp to dune forest to beach, and each habitat is so distinct that crossing from one to the next feels like changing channels. The dune forest smells of pine and salt, the sand is soft enough to slow your pace, and the beach at trail's end faces the Bay with a gentleness that the ocean side of Virginia Beach cannot match — calm water, pelicans working the surface, and on clear days the far shore of the Eastern Shore visible as a thin line of green on the horizon.

Best season: October, when the cypress needles turn copper and the park empties of summer beachgoers. Bring bug spray in summer — the swamp mosquitoes are not metaphorical. The park charges a parking fee ($10-$15) but the trails are worth ten times that, and the beach at the end is the reward.