Visitor guide
Cape Henlopen State Park
A five-thousand-acre hook of sand at the corner where Delaware Bay meets the Atlantic Ocean — with beaches on two different bodies of water, a fishing pier a quarter of a mile long, and a buried army fort with a watchtower you can still climb.
Cape Henlopen sits at the eastern edge of Lewes, Delaware. It is one of the few places on the East Coast where you can stand with the ocean on one side of you and a bay on the other.
It is also one of two. The mouth of Delaware Bay is made by a pair of capes facing each other across about ten miles of open water — Cape May on the New Jersey side, Cape Henlopen on the Delaware side. Everything that has ever come into this bay came in through the gap between them, and almost everything worth knowing about this cape only makes sense once you know there is another one across the water.
Most people come for the beach. What surprises them is everything else: a concrete tower in the dunes, a gun barrel off a battleship, and a fishing pier where a German submarine once tied up.
The cape is moving. Sand carried up the coast piles onto the point and the spit has grown roughly a mile northward over the last 160 years. The land you walk on at the tip is younger than the town behind you.
The Point is closed as you read this. The northern tip shuts every spring for nesting and migrating shorebirds. In 2026 the oceanside beach reopens on 1 September and the bayside on 1 October. The dunes behind the fencing are off limits all year. Full dates and what is open.
What is actually here
Two coastlines
Ocean beach on the Atlantic side with surf and dunes; calmer, shallower water on the bay side. Different weather, different swimming, ten minutes apart.
The fishing pier
A long pier into the bay, open to the public. Also the exact spot where the war ended for one German crew in 1945.
Fort Miles
A 1,000-acre coast artillery fort built into the dunes in 1941, with a museum inside an underground bunker.
The watchtowers
Concrete towers, thrown up in a hurry in 1942, to spot ships nobody could see. Two of them in Delaware are open to climb.
Trails and dunes
Walking and biking trails through pine woods and dune land, including the Great Dune — one of the tallest on the mid-Atlantic coast.
Camping
A campground in the pines near the ocean side, popular enough in summer that sites go early. Cabins and RV sites too.
Seaside Nature Center
Touch tanks and exhibits on what lives in the water off the cape. Good rainy-day and small-children option.
Borrow a bike
The park runs a bike-lending program, and the paved trails are flat and easy. Walking and biking in is free.
Planning a visit
Getting there
The park entrance is on Cape Henlopen Drive, at the eastern end of Lewes. It is a few minutes from the Cape May–Lewes Ferry terminal, which sits on the same road — so if you are arriving by ferry, the park is essentially next door. Downtown Lewes is about two and a half miles from the terminal — further than it sounds, and not a comfortable walk with luggage.
Fees and hours
Delaware State Parks charges vehicle entry during the warm months, with a lower rate for Delaware-registered vehicles, and the grounds open early and close at sunset. Rates and seasonal hours change, and the museum inside the fort keeps its own shorter schedule.
Check the official pages before you go: Delaware State Parks — Cape Henlopen and Fort Miles Museum.
How long to give it
A beach day is a beach day. But if you want to see the fort, climb the tower and walk out on the pier, budget two to three hours on top of whatever else you are doing — and check the museum's open days first, because it is not open every day of the week outside high summer.
The part most visitors miss
For four years during the Second World War, this cape was the front door of one of the most heavily defended stretches of coast in the United States — because behind it, up the bay, lay the oil refineries and shipyards of Wilmington and Philadelphia.
What was built here to protect that:
- Guns big enough to shoot 25 miles, buried in the dunes so they looked like sand from the sea.
- Concrete towers — eleven along the Delaware coast and four more across the bay in New Jersey — because the guns could shoot far past the horizon but nobody could see that far. Two towers pointing telescopes at the same ship, from a known distance apart, could work out exactly where it was.
- 455 mines on the seabed across the mouth of the bay. Not the floating kind — each one sat on the bottom wired back to a switch in a bunker on shore, so friendly ships crossed over them safely all day and only an enemy would ever set one off.
- Miles of electric cable lying on the seabed as a tripwire. A steel hull passing over it nudged the current, and a needle twitched on shore.
It worked. No enemy submarine ever entered Delaware Bay, and the big guns at Fort Miles never once fired at an enemy in four years of war.
And then on 14 May 1945, a German submarine surfaced off this cape and gave herself up. She was brought in and tied to the fort's mine wharf — the first enemy warship to surrender in United States waters since the War of 1812. That wharf is the fishing pier. There is a marker near it.
Almost none of this is obvious when you drive in. That is the point of this site.
Under the water
The water off this cape has swallowed a good deal.
In 1798 a British warship coming into the bay was laid over by a squall and went down in minutes off the point, taking her captain and forty-six of his crew. For nearly two centuries people were certain she was full of Spanish treasure. In the 1980s a salvage operation finally reached her, spent millions, tore up the wreck — and found no treasure, because there had never been any. What survives of her hull is kept wet in a building inside this park. Some of the recovered pieces are on display for free at the Zwaanendael Museum in Lewes.
The cape has also taken its own lighthouse. The stone tower that stood here from the 1760s was undermined by the sea and fell in on 13 April 1926. People carted the stone away within days and built it into fireplaces around Lewes, where a good deal of it still is.