Experience the best of Biloxi

Biloxi sits on a peninsula between the Mississippi Sound and the Back Bay of Biloxi on the Gulf Coast. French colonists led by Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville founded a settlement on Biloxi Bay in 1699, and the city has been a fishing and seafood town ever since. A cast-iron lighthouse of 1848 stands in the middle of the coast highway, and the shrimp fleet is blessed each year at the harbour.

Beauvoir, the last home of the Confederate president Jefferson Davis, stands on the waterfront with a presidential library, and the Ohr-O'Keefe Museum honours the potter George Ohr, the Mad Potter of Biloxi, in buildings by Frank Gehry. The Maritime and Seafood Industry Museum tells of the fishing trade, casino resorts line the beach, and boats run out to Ship Island, part of Gulf Islands National Seashore, which has a brick fort.

Gulf shrimp in po' boys, oysters, blue crab and seafood gumbo are the local meals. The wide beach itself is largely man-made, raised with imported sand in the twentieth century. Summers are long, hot and humid, and winters are mild.