There are countless things to do in Virginia, but the royal visit has lent the state a sharper sense of occasion. Virginia is a place where English colonial history, bluegrass traditions, horse country and seaside Art Deco sit closer together than they have any right to.
At times, the place names and brickwork suggest a scrap of Georgian restraint was smuggled over in someone’s luggage, but Virginia is far more compelling than borrowed Britishness. So here are 7 things to do in Virginia that are fit for a King (or Queen).
1. Ride out in Loudoun County, Washington’s answer to the Home Counties
Loudoun County has long understood the criteria of the weekend escape. For Washington, DC, it plays a role not unlike the Home Counties for London: close enough for a swift retreat, far enough to pretend emails no longer exist. Queen Camilla’s solo visit to Smitten Farm in Virginia, where she met horse-racing and equine-welfare figures, underlined how deeply the region’s identity is tied to the horse world.
Middleburg, in particular, knows how to wear tweed without parody. At Salamander Middleburg, you can take guided trail rides, horsemanship experiences and riding lessons; those arriving with their own horses can even arrange overnight stabling, which is either delightfully practical or faintly absurd depending on how many animals usually accompany you on holiday.
The result is not costume-drama Virginia, but a living equestrian culture with mud, muscle and manners and a one of the essential things to do in Virginia.
2. Stay at the Williamsburg Inn, twice good enough for a Queen
Some hotels claim royal connections because someone once ordered tea in the lobby. The Williamsburg Inn has rather better paperwork. Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip stayed there during visits linked to Jamestown commemorations in 1957 and again in 2007, marking the 350th and 400th anniversaries of the first permanent English settlement in North America.
The inn sits beside Colonial Williamsburg, where American history is performed, preserved and argued over in brick, costume and candlelight. The royal connection is not merely decorative; it speaks to the awkward, enduring intimacy between Britain and the United States.
To stay here is to enter a room where empire, independence and excellent bed linen have all, at various points, been carefully arranged. The Queen’s Suite now honours Elizabeth II’s 2007 stay, but the greater fascination is how Williamsburg turns history into a story without entirely smoothing away its complications.
3. Follow the King’s green instincts to Shenandoah National Park
King Charles’s interest in conservation is hardly new, and Virginia’s mountain country gives that theme room to breathe. Shenandoah National Park, Virginia’s only national park, runs along the Blue Ridge Mountains and is threaded by Skyline Drive, a road that seems designed for people who enjoy arriving late because they stopped too often.
The royal tour’s Virginia leg included environmental themes, making Shenandoah a natural extension for anyone interested in nature and the outdoors.
The park is often folded into a broader mythology of country roads and Appalachian longing, but it is more than a scenic backdrop. There are black bears, old homesteads, weathered stone walls and trails that shift from gentle stroll to calf-burning rebuke with little warning. This is the quieter: mist lifting off ridges, hawks holding their line above the valley part of the American eastern wilderness.
4. Hear the underground organ at Luray Caverns
Near Shenandoah, Luray Caverns adds an eccentric note to any royal-flavoured Virginia itinerary. The caverns are home to the Great Stalacpipe Organ, an electrically operated lithophone that uses rubber mallets to tap tuned stalactites. Luray Caverns describes it as the world’s largest musical instrument, spread through roughly three acres of the cave system.
It was the creation of Leland W. Sprinkle, a Pentagon mathematician and electronics scientist, who began the project in the 1950s after hearing the musical potential of the stone. The sound is strange and delicate – more of a mineral whisper. The caverns are also a wedding venue, which feels brave as not every couple chooses to begin married life beneath ancient rock formations while stalactites provide the accompaniment.
5. Visit Richmond’s expanded Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden
For a monarch who has spent decades talking about gardens, soil and the health of the planet, Richmond’s Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden has chosen a good moment to grow. Its expanded conservatory is due to open to the public this month, with new gardens, four climate zones and a year-round butterfly house.
The garden has also added more than seven acres of meadows with a high proportion of native planting, a detail that matters in an age when gardens are increasingly expected to do more than look agreeable. Richmond itself is a city of difficult histories and handsome avenues, and the botanical garden offers a softer experience.
It is not exactly escapism, but it is a reminder that horticulture is never neutral. What we plant, conserve and invite to pollinate says something about the future we think we deserve. The butterflies, one suspects, are less burdened by this interpretation.
6. Check into Virginia Beach’s Cavalier Hotel for the Roaring Twenties theatre
The Cavalier Hotel in Virginia Beach belongs to that glamorous category of seaside hotels that seem faintly surprised the 20th century ever ended. Opened in 1927, it carries the style of the Roaring Twenties: broad lawns, formal spaces, salt air and the sort of corridors where one expects a silent movie director to be arguing with his lead protagonist.
The hotel’s history is tied to celebrity guests and show-business mythology, with names often associated with its guestbook including Frank Sinatra, Charlie Chaplin and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Its modern appeal is not simply nostalgia, though there is plenty of that. The Cavalier has leaned into its Prohibition-era mood with Tarnished Truth Distilling Co. in the basement and a speakeasy-style bar, giving guests the sensation of doing something mildly illicit while remaining entirely within the rules. If you are looking for things to do in Virginia that are royal-grade indulgence without the court protocol, this is Virginia in dinner jacket mode.
7. Join the small-town pageant in Front Royal
Royal visits often reveal more about the hosts than the guests. In Front Royal, around 70 miles from Washington, DC, King Charles and Queen Camilla attended an America250 block party with marching bands, classic cars, local groups, agricultural displays, bluegrass music and Appalachian clog dancing.
That combination of scouts, sheep, little-league baseball, potluck food and royal handshakes could have tipped into pure civic theatre. Instead, it neatly captured Virginia’s habit of compressing grand history into local ritual. Front Royal is also a gateway to the Shenandoah Valley, so it makes sense as more than a royal photo call.
It is where political symbolism gives way to the everyday business of place, and everyone briefly pretends not to be checking whether they made it into the background of an international news photograph.
Conclusion: 7 things to do in Virginia
Virginia’s English connections are real, but so are its American reinventions. Horses in Loudoun County, colonial memory in Williamsburg, conservation in Shenandoah, botanical ambition in Richmond and seaside glamour in Virginia Beach all reveal different ways the state handles history.
The state does not simply preserve the past, it edits, argues with and occasionally pours a drink over it and in doing so create some absolutely wonderful things to do in Virginia nowadays.
