Explore Savannah

Forsyth Park is a 12-hectare city park at the southern edge of Savannah's historic district, laid out in the 1840s and 1850s. Its white cast-iron fountain of 1858 stands at the end of an avenue of live oaks hung with Spanish moss. The park also has a Confederate memorial, a fragrant garden, sports fields and a weekly farmers' market.

The Mercer Williams House is an Italianate brick mansion on Monterey Square, begun for General Hugh Mercer, great-grandfather of the songwriter Johnny Mercer, and completed in 1868. The antiques dealer Jim Williams restored it from 1969, and a killing in the house in 1981 became the subject of the book and film Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Tours show the ground-floor rooms.

Congregation Mickve Israel on Monterey Square was founded in 1733 by Jewish settlers, most of them Sephardic, who arrived from London months after the founding of Georgia; it is one of the oldest congregations in the United States. Its Gothic Revival synagogue was consecrated in 1878, and a small museum shows a Torah scroll brought by the first settlers and letters from early presidents.

The Cathedral Basilica of St. John the Baptist near Lafayette Square is the mother church of the Catholic Diocese of Savannah. The French Gothic Revival building with twin spires was completed in 1876, rebuilt after a fire in 1898 and restored in 2000. Inside are stained-glass windows made in Austria and painted murals.

The Juliette Gordon Low Birthplace on Oglethorpe Avenue is the Regency-style house, built in 1821, where the founder of the Girl Scouts of the USA was born in 1860. Owned by the Girl Scouts and opened as a museum in 1956, it is restored to the 1880s and shows family furnishings, Low's own artwork and the story of the movement she started in Savannah in 1912.

The Telfair Academy on Telfair Square is a Regency mansion designed by William Jay and built in 1819 for the Telfair family. It opened as a public art museum in 1886, the oldest in the American South. It shows 19th- and 20th-century American and European art, period rooms, and the Bird Girl statue from the cover of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

The Davenport House on Columbia Square is a Federal-style brick house built in 1820 by the master builder Isaiah Davenport. Its threatened demolition in 1955 led to the founding of the Historic Savannah Foundation, which has run it as a museum since 1963. Guided tours show the furnished rooms and tell of the family and the enslaved people who lived and worked there.

The American Prohibition Museum in Savannah's City Market tells the story of the years from 1920 to 1933 when alcohol was banned in the United States. Its galleries show the temperance movement, bootleggers, rum-runners and gangsters through period cars, wax figures and film, and end in a working speakeasy bar.

River Street runs along the Savannah River below the bluff of the historic district. Its cobblestone section is lined with 19th-century cotton warehouses, built several storeys high against the bluff and now used as shops, restaurants and bars. Stairways and iron bridges connect it with Factors Walk and Bay Street above, and ships pass close to the promenade.

Bonaventure Cemetery lies on a bluff above the Wilmington River, about 5 km east of downtown Savannah, on the grounds of a former plantation. A city cemetery since 1907, it covers some 65 hectares of avenues of live oaks hung with Spanish moss, with Victorian monuments and the graves of the songwriter Johnny Mercer and the poet Conrad Aiken.

Wormsloe State Historic Site on the Isle of Hope, about 15 km south-east of downtown Savannah, preserves part of the colonial estate of Noble Jones, one of Georgia's first settlers. A 2.4-km avenue lined with some 400 live oaks leads to the tabby ruins of his fortified house of the 1740s, the oldest standing structure in Savannah, a museum and a colonial life area.