8 Georgia Coastal Towns Locals Love (and Tourists Overrun)
Georgia’s coastline runs only about 105 miles. That’s shorter than a single stretch of Florida’s coastline.
Most of that coastline isn’t a beach you can drive to.
A boat, a ferry reservation, or a local with a dock decides who reaches five of Georgia’s best stretches, while everybody else piles onto the same three.
These are the coastal towns Georgians love for fewer crowds, and those the rest of the country already discovered.
Coastal Towns Georgians Love
Reaching the following coastal towns takes a reservation, a kayak, or a friend who already has a dock.
Many locals wouldn’t want it any other way.
Sapelo Island
Sapelo Island isn’t something a tourist just decides to visit.
The only way in is a state-run ferry from Meridian, a few miles up the coast from Darien.
Boarding it means you’re either a landowner or someone they invited.
No exceptions.
Hog Hammock, the island’s one settlement, is home to an estimated 70 residents, though the count has been shrinking amid a long-running land dispute.
They’re descendants of the enslaved workers who once ran the island’s plantations, and it’s one of the last Gullah-Geechee communities left on the Georgia coast.
Tobacco heir R.J. Reynolds Jr. bought the island’s south end in 1934 and left behind a mansion with a bowling lane and a circus-themed parlor, which the state now rents out for tours and overnight stays.
Nannygoat Beach sits a short walk from the dock, and hardly anyone’s ever there.
Cumberland Island
The National Park Service, not the state, controls the gate onto Cumberland Island.
Rangers cap ferry traffic at 300 a day, and once the boat from St. Marys fills, the rest of the line waits for tomorrow.
Wild horses roam the dunes near the old Dungeness ruins, all that’s left of the Carnegie family’s Gilded Age estate.
Greyfield Inn, the one hotel on the island, still belongs to Carnegie descendants and keeps no fixed checkout time, since there’s rarely another guest waiting on your room.
Georgians who plan around the ferry schedule get a beach with more shorebirds than people.
That’s the whole appeal.
Little Tybee Island
Little Tybee Island sits a short paddle from its crowded twin, with nobody keeping score of who gets there first.
No bridge and no ferry reach this 6,500-acre stretch of marsh and dune, so the only way across is a kayak, canoe or somebody’s boat.
Outfitters like Sea Kayak Georgia rent boats right off Tybee’s back river for the crossing, and the paddle over takes about half an hour, longer if the tide is running against you.
Once you land, there’s no bathroom, no snack stand and no cell signal, just driftwood piled into what regulars call the boneyard.
Georgians who grew up wading across at low tide treat it like a backyard nobody else knows about.
Psst! How much do you know about Georgia’s coast? Take our quiz and see if you can ace it.
Quiz
Georgia Coast History IQ
Answer these questions on Georgia’s coastal history and lore. We bet you can’t get them all right. Prove us wrong?
Legend says a real pirate hid in the creeks of which Georgia barrier island, giving it his nickname?
St. Marys
No beach crowd ever fought over St. Marys because the town doesn't have a beach of its own to lose.
Twenty founders laid out the town on the St. Marys River in 1788, six miles up from the ocean, and locals still call it the gateway to Cumberland Island.
That gateway role means the crowds pass through St. Marys, not into it.
The historic waterfront district's nineteenth-century storefronts remain intact, and 18,256 people call the town home, many of them tied to the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base rather than tourism.
Georgians drive down for the ferry, grab dinner on the waterfront before boarding, and never fight anyone for a parking spot.
The rush happens twelve miles offshore.
Not on Main Street.
Darien
Darien has outlasted more than one industry, and little of it is dressed up for visitors.
Scottish Highlanders founded the town on the Altamaha River in 1736, and local histories credit Darien and McIntosh County with running the largest shrimping fleet on the Georgia coast by the early 1960s.
About 1,460 people live there now, and the shrimp boats still dock behind Skipper's Fish Camp, where the catch on your plate came off a trawler tied up twenty feet away.
The Blessing of the Fleet festival draws the biggest weekend of the year, and even that doesn't fill a single hotel to capacity.
Georgians pass through on the way to Sapelo's ferry dock and end up staying for the shrimp.
Nobody's rushing them out.
Coastal Towns Filled With Tourists
Three towns on Georgia's coast draw the kind of crowds that many locals prefer to avoid.
These towns show up on many top-10 lists, and the parking lots prove it by 9 a.m.
Tybee Island
Every visitor funnels down the same single road onto Tybee Island, and the backup starts before you even see water.
Highway 80 is the only route out to the island from Savannah, eighteen miles away, and a wreck or a summer Saturday can turn that drive into an hour.
A Georgia Southern University study found tourism on Tybee jumped nearly 70% in less than a decade, and the island now pulls close to 1.7 million visitors a year.
Assistant City Manager Michelle Owens put it plainly: Tybee's 3,000 full-time residents share their town with a daily crowd of 30,000 to 40,000 strangers.
That's a lot of neighbors.
The Breakfast Club still packs a line out the door most mornings, same as it's done since 1976.
Locals learn to shop and eat around whatever hour the tour buses haven't found yet.
St. Simons Island
The math on St. Simons Island favors renters: More rental beds sit on the island than year-round houses, and every rental bed fills by June.
Thousands of tourists add themselves to the island's population every day of peak summer, according to the Golden Isles Convention & Visitors Bureau.
The pier village fills first, then the lighthouse grounds, then every table at the restaurants ringing the marina.
Golf carts outnumber the open parking spots at the beach accesses by mid-morning.
Good luck parking.
Georgians who live there time their grocery runs and their tee times around whatever week school lets out up north.
Summer stops being theirs the day the buses arrive.
Jekyll Island
The Jekyll Island Authority charges you before you even find a parking spot, and that's by design.
Nothing here is free.
The Jekyll Island Authority collects a daily $10 parking fee from every car that crosses the causeway, and it puts that money back into roads and beach upkeep for a crowd that keeps growing.
That crowd has grown to more than 3 million visitors a year, roughly double what the island drew before a decade-long redevelopment turned around a decline that had set in by the mid-2000s.
Driftwood Beach draws photographers at sunrise, the Georgia Sea Turtle Center draws families by midday, and the historic Jekyll Island Club Resort draws everyone in between who wants a look at the old millionaires' summer cottages.
Book a room inside the historic district, and the crowd thins out fast once the day-trippers catch the last shuttle off the island in the evening.
By the time the causeway empties out, Driftwood Beach belongs to whoever's still standing on it, watching the tide fill in around the bleached tree trunks that give the beach its name.
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