When it comes to locating the best beaches in North Carolina, it’s as easy as picking a beach town on a North Carolina map and driving there. The eastern shoreline of North Carolina is all sand, waves and surf. Not one of its more than 300 miles of beach is anything less than spectacular.
North Carolina beaches do have distinct personalities, however. Northernmost Cordova Beach, Swan Beach and Corolla Beach are remote enough for wild horses to still roam there, as are Shackleford Banks and Cape Lookout further south. Wrightsville Beach, Carolina Beach and Atlantic Beach can become a bit crowded during tourist season, but they are not nearly as commercialized and congested with traffic as Myrtle Beach in South Carolina.
Top Beaches in North Carolina – The Outer Banks, or OBX
Nearly seven million people visit the North Carolina Outer Banks each year, according to the 2010 edition of the Outer Banks Visitors Guide published by Vista Graphics, Inc. That’s quite a cry from the roaming bands of Croatan Indians who first fished and hunted here. It’s also a long way from the small band of European colonists who landed here and whose story is retold each year in Manteo’s The Lost Colony performances on Roanoke Island. Today’s parasailers, hang-gliders, and kite-flyers make use of the same enormous sand dunes and ideal breezes that, in 1903, lifted Wilbur and Orville Wright off the ground and into the pages of aeronautical history.
