Astoria clings to a steep hillside where the Columbia River meets the Pacific, and it wears its past on its sleeve — the first permanent American settlement west of the Rockies, founded in 1811 as a fur-trading post. Salmon canneries, a working port and the four-mile Astoria-Megler Bridge still shape the skyline today. From the 125-foot Astoria Column on Coxcomb Hill to the shipwrecks scattered along the Clatsop shore, the things to do in Astoria run heavy on maritime history, Lewis and Clark heritage and Goonies-era film lore. Here are 25 of the best.
25 Best Things to Do in Astoria, Oregon (2026)
Things to Do in Astoria, Oregon 1. Astoria Column
The Astoria Column rises 125 feet from the top of Coxcomb Hill, itself some 600 feet above the river, so the climb up its 164 interior steps lands you on a viewing platform that takes in the Columbia, the Pacific and, on clear days, the peaks of the Cascade Range. Dedicated in 1926, the tower honours the region's early settlers with a spiralling sgraffito frieze designed by Italian artist Attilio Pusterla, who modelled it on Rome's Trajan's Column. Visitors keep up the long-running tradition of launching balsa-wood gliders from the top.
2. Comcomly's Memorial
Comcomly's Memorial sits in Coxcomb Hill's hilltop park beside the Astoria Column, raised in 1961 by descendants of the chief to mark the city's 150th anniversary. It takes the form of a Chinook burial canoe held aloft on four concrete pillars and carved with Chinook motifs. Comcomly led the Chinook people around the mouth of the Columbia in the early 1800s and traded with both American and British fur companies. He gave shelter and provisions to the Lewis and Clark expedition, and the memorial nods to that role in the earliest chapter of Astoria's story.
3. Astoria-Megler Bridge
The Astoria-Megler Bridge runs 4.1 miles across the mouth of the Columbia, linking the Oregon shore to Point Ellice in Washington. When it opened in 1966 it closed the last gap in U.S. Route 101, the highway that hugs the Pacific coast from Washington to California. Its continuous-truss main span is the longest of its kind in North America, engineered to shrug off river currents and gale-force coastal winds. For the classic view from below, follow the Astoria Riverwalk to the point where the tracks pass beneath the green steel frame.
4. Astoria Riverwalk
The Astoria Riverwalk threads just over a mile of boardwalk and paved path along the working waterfront, shadowing the route of the historic riverfront trolley. It strings together the Port of Astoria, weathered old canneries and the Maritime Memorial honouring locals lost at sea. Ocean-going ships from around the world tie up along the way, and you pass the scars of Astoria's fishing heyday — cannery pilings, some abandoned, some lost to the great fire of 1922. Each August the Riverwalk fills for the Astoria Regatta, a four-day festival of parades and boat shows dating back to 1894.
5. Columbia River Maritime Museum
The Columbia River Maritime Museum holds more than 30,000 objects, the largest maritime collection in the Pacific Northwest, all built around the treacherous river mouth known as the Graveyard of the Pacific. Interactive galleries chart the hundreds of shipwrecks scattered across the bar, a simulator recreates a storm on the water, and Coast Guard footage shows crews battling 40-foot waves. The admission also covers the lightship Columbia moored outside, which guided vessels across the bar until a navigational buoy replaced it in 1979.
6. Explore the Docks
Explore the docks and you reach the part of Astoria where the city's fishing past is still most tangible. Head out along the boardwalk to Pier 39, home to the oldest and largest building on the waterfront — roughly 85,000 square feet that once housed a Bumble Bee cannery and now shelters the Hanthorn Cannery Museum, a coffee roaster and the Rogue alehouse. A few piers east, Pier 36 — known locally as the East Mooring Basin — draws the barking crowds of California sea lions that haul out on the floating docks, sometimes by the hundreds. The noise and smell are unmistakable long before you reach the railing.
7. Hanthorn Cannery Museum
The Hanthorn Cannery Museum occupies the oldest surviving cannery building on the lower Columbia, founded in 1875 out on Pier 39. By the turn of the century the plant was turning out tens of thousands of cases of canned salmon a year. Founder J.O. Hanthorn's operation became part of Bumble Bee Seafoods in 1899, and the free museum traces that industry through original canning machinery, ledgers and photographs. Three wooden gillnet fishing boats sit on the floor alongside a walk-in industrial freezer you can step inside.
8. Riverfront Trolley
The Astoria Riverfront Trolley trundles three miles along the old railroad grade beside the Columbia, tracing tracks first laid in the 1880s to carry residents down to the beaches. The line reopened as a heritage tram in 1999. The car itself, the maroon-and-cream "Old 300", was built in 1913 and once ran in San Antonio, Texas, before volunteers restored it for Astoria. It rolls between Portway Street and 39th Street, with the Maritime Museum the busiest stop along the way, carrying tens of thousands of riders a year.
9. Uppertown Firefighters Museum
The Uppertown Firefighters Museum fills a building from 1896 that started life as the bottling works of the North Pacific Brewing Company. Shuttered under Prohibition, it was pressed into service as a fire station in 1928. Inside, the collection runs from a horse-drawn hand pumper up to a 1946 Mack pumper, tracing how firefighting gear evolved across roughly a century. Photographs and hand tools, some dating to the 1870s, round out the story of protecting a timber-and-cannery town that repeatedly burned.
10. Flavel House
The Flavel House is Astoria's grandest Queen Anne mansion, completed in 1886 as the retirement home of Captain George Flavel — the first Columbia River bar pilot and the town's first millionaire. The 11,600-square-foot house keeps much of its original furnishing, from crystal chandeliers to hand-carved fireplace mantels imported from around the world. A four-storey octagonal tower let the captain watch ship traffic on the river below; the kitchen, music room, bedrooms and the surrounding grounds and carriage house are all open to visitors.
11. Fort Stevens State Park
Fort Stevens State Park sprawls across roughly 4,300 acres of forest, beach and wetland at the very tip of Oregon, laced with about nine miles of trails for hiking, cycling and one of the state's largest campgrounds. At its core stands the old military fort, now a self-guided historic area with batteries, an underground gun emplacement and a reconstructed Civil War-era earthwork. Built in 1863, Fort Stevens guarded the mouth of the Columbia for 84 years and was famously shelled by a Japanese submarine in 1942 — the only mainland U.S. military post fired on during the Second World War.
12. Clatsop Spit
Clatsop Spit is the low, wind-scoured tongue of sand at the northwest corner of Fort Stevens State Park, where the Columbia finally spills into the Pacific. Built up over thousands of years by river sediment reworked by wind and surf, it ends at the South Jetty overlook. The waters off the spit form part of the Graveyard of the Pacific, and the shifting bar has claimed hundreds of vessels since the early 1800s. Elevated viewing platforms make it a prime spot for watching Pacific storms roll in and, in season, migrating gray whales offshore.
13. Fort Clatsop
Fort Clatsop is a full-scale replica of the log stockade where the Corps of Discovery hunkered down through the wet winter of 1805–06 before starting the long journey home. It anchors the Lewis and Clark National Historical Park. The current fort was rebuilt by volunteers in 2006 after fire destroyed an earlier reconstruction, following the dimensions Clark sketched in his journal. In summer, rangers in period dress demonstrate flintlock firing and candle-making along the wooded trails and recount the expedition's damp, elk-hunting months on the Oregon coast.
14. Peter Iredale Wreck
The Peter Iredale wreck rusts on the beach inside Fort Stevens State Park and ranks among the most-photographed shipwrecks anywhere. At low tide you can walk right up to the skeletal iron bow. The four-masted sailing barque was built in England in 1890 and ran aground here in October 1906, driven onto the sand by heavy surf and a sudden shift of wind as it made for the Columbia. All 27 crew survived, but the ship was left where she lay; more than a century of tides has stripped her to a few ribs and the curved bow that catches every sunset.
15. Fort Astoria
Fort Astoria marks the spot where the city began — a fur-trading post founded in 1811 by John Jacob Astor's Pacific Fur Company, the first permanent American settlement on the Pacific coast. It gave the town both its name and its reason for being. The British seized the post during the War of 1812 and renamed it Fort George, before it passed back to American hands and stayed in use until 1848. Today a small downtown commemorative park traces the fort's footprint on the pavement, with a partial blockhouse replica and a plaque marking the roots of Astoria.
16. Fort George Brewery
Fort George Brewery pours its beer on the very block where the original 1811 fort once stood — the "Fort George" name borrows the British-era title given to the post during the War of 1812. The brewery grew out of a former downtown car dealership. What began as a small brewpub in 2007 has expanded into a 30-barrel brewhouse spread across a taproom, restaurants and a canning line. You can work through its rotating line-up of ales and lagers with the Columbia and the Washington hills in view, and weekend tours walk you through the brewing floor.
17. Garden of Surging Waves
The Garden of Surging Waves is a downtown pocket park that honours the Chinese immigrants who worked Astoria's canneries and built its early economy. It opened in 2014 to mark the city's bicentennial. Bronze and stone sculpture, a moon gate and an open-air amphitheatre fill the small plaza. A mosaic of nine salmon and three sturgeon salutes the cannery workers, another panel honours the railroad crews, and among eight carved dragon columns one is left deliberately broken — a quiet emblem of the families the Chinese pioneers left behind.
18. Oregon Film Museum
Oregon's varied landscapes have doubled for countless films, and the Oregon Film Museum tells that story from inside the old Clatsop County Jail — the same 1914 jailhouse that opens The Goonies. The building alone is a draw for fans of the 1985 film. Galleries celebrate movies shot around the state, from The Goonies and Kindergarten Cop to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, filmed at the state hospital in Salem. Visitors can shoot their own scene on a green-screen set, edit it in a post-production booth and add a mugshot to the museum's wall of "prisoners".
19. Heritage Museum
The Heritage Museum occupies Astoria's neoclassical former City Hall, designed by Portland architect Emil Schacht and completed in 1904. Its galleries carry the everyday history of Clatsop County. The collection ranges from thousand-year-old Native hunting tools and Clatsop basketry to logging saws and fishing gear that trace the town's twin timber and salmon economies. A standout is the fully reconstructed Prohibition-era saloon, alongside an Emigrants gallery telling the stories of the Finnish, Chinese and Scandinavian communities who settled Astoria.
20. Cathedral Tree Trail
The Cathedral Tree Trail is a free, roughly one-mile footpath that climbs the forested flank of Coxcomb Hill through old-growth Sitka spruce, western hemlock and thick moss. It offers a wilder, quieter alternative to driving up to the Astoria Column. Its namesake is the Cathedral Tree, a Sitka spruce more than 300 years old that sprouted from a fallen nurse log and now stands around 200 feet tall and some eight feet across, with a hollow arch at its base you can step through. From the tree, the trail carries on uphill to connect with the Astoria Column at the top of the ridge.
21. Astoria Sunday Market
The Astoria Sunday Market spreads across four blocks of downtown from May through October, one of the largest open-air markets in Oregon since it started in 2000. Locals and day-trippers pack the streets every Sunday of the season. Roughly 200 vendors line the pavement with regional produce, handmade crafts, jewellery, preserves and fine art, backed by a food court and live music through the day. It is the easiest place in town to sample the surrounding farms and pick up something made on the north Oregon coast.
22. Liberty Theatre
The Liberty Theatre is downtown Astoria's restored performing-arts hall and a centrepiece of its cultural calendar, hosting touring artists, the Astoria Music Festival and the North Coast Symphonic Band. It opened in 1925 as a vaudeville and movie palace — the first theatre to rise after the fire that levelled much of downtown in 1922, and so a symbol of the city's recovery. Careful restorations have preserved its Italianate interior, right down to the twelve murals of Venetian scenes ringing the auditorium.
23. Josephson's Smokehouse
Josephson's Smokehouse has smoked Columbia River seafood at 106 Marine Drive since 1920, when Norwegian immigrant and salmon fisherman Anton Josephson opened it. Four generations of the family have run it, making it one of the oldest continuously operating smokehouses on the West Coast. The shop still cures its fish the old way, over alder in on-site smokers, and sells it fresh from the racks — smoked salmon and sturgeon, salmon jerky, canned tuna and smoked scallops among them. The smell of alder smoke greets you on the sidewalk, a working link to the cannery trade that built Astoria.
24. Underground Tour
Beneath downtown Astoria runs a network of tunnels and shanghai passages dating to the early 1900s, first dug to move goods from the ships up into the shops and later used for rather less lawful ends, from opium dens to the crimping of sailors onto outbound vessels. On the Underground Tour, guides who played in these tunnels as local kids lead you through the history and the darker legends, using lighting and effects along the way. The route takes in a below-ground room, still scattered with objects recovered from the passages, where transient men once slept.
25. Columbia River Eco Tour
The Columbia River Eco Tour is one of the finest ways to grasp the scale of the river and read the working waterfront from the water itself, gliding past the docks, the old canneries and out beneath the Astoria-Megler Bridge. The skipper narrates old and new Astoria as you pass anchored freighters, floating homes and busy wharves. Nearer the Lewis and Clark National Wildlife Refuge, keep watch for bald eagles and osprey overhead and harbour seals in the channels of the lower Columbia.
FAQ: Visiting Astoria
What is Astoria best known for?
Astoria is best known as the oldest American settlement west of the Rockies and for its maritime heritage. Landmarks like the 1926 Astoria Column, the Columbia River Maritime Museum, the Peter Iredale shipwreck at Fort Stevens, and the Goonies-famous Oregon Film Museum draw most visitors to this hilltop town at the mouth of the Columbia.
Is Astoria worth visiting?
Yes. Few small towns pack in this much history and coastline. You can climb the Astoria Column for sweeping river views, tour the Columbia River Maritime Museum, walk the waterfront Riverwalk, and reach the beaches and shipwreck of Fort Stevens State Park within minutes, making Astoria an easy and rewarding stop on the Oregon coast.
How many days do you need in Astoria?
Two days suits most visitors. One day covers the compact downtown, the Astoria Column, Flavel House and the Maritime Museum. A second day gives you time for Fort Stevens State Park, the Peter Iredale wreck, Fort Clatsop and a Columbia River Eco Tour on the water. History enthusiasts could easily fill a third.
What can you do for free in Astoria?
Plenty. The Astoria Riverwalk, Fort Astoria's commemorative park, the Garden of Surging Waves plaza and Comcomly's Memorial on Coxcomb Hill all cost nothing. The Cathedral Tree Trail is a free old-growth hike, and watching the barking sea lions haul out on the East Mooring Basin docks is a no-cost Astoria highlight.
When is the best time to visit Astoria?
Summer, from June through September, brings the driest weather and the fullest calendar, including the Astoria Sunday Market from May to October and the four-day Astoria Regatta each August. Winter is wetter but rewards storm-watchers at Clatsop Spit and the South Jetty, where Pacific gales pile surf against the Columbia bar.
Free Things to Do in Astoria
Astoria rewards visitors on a budget. Stroll the waterfront on the Astoria Riverwalk, trace the city's 1811 origins at Fort Astoria, and honour its Chinese pioneers at the Garden of Surging Waves. Up on Coxcomb Hill, pay respects at Comcomly's Memorial, then hike the old-growth Cathedral Tree Trail to the base of the Astoria Column.
Planning more of your trip? Keep exploring things to do in Oregon.