Barnstable County

The county in brief

A traveler's read on Barnstable County

Forty miles of unbroken Atlantic shoreline preserved as a single continuous National Seashore — Cape Cod National Seashore at 43,604 acres is the longest shoreline-only NPS unit on the US East Coast per the NPS Foundation Document acreage tables, and the only NPS unit east of the Mississippi where three separate historic lighthouses (Highland Light in Truro, Race Point Light in Provincetown, and Nauset Light in Eastham) all offer public-access climbing tours coordinated through the cooperating associations of each light. Cape Cod NS was established in 1961 under President Kennedy (himself a Cape Cod summer resident at the Hyannis Port family compound) as a 'preservation seashore' rather than as a recreation seashore — the legislative model was to acquire the land before the post-WWII summer-cottage real-estate boom consumed it, with private inholdings allowed to remain inside the boundary under restrictive easement agreements but no new construction permitted. The result today is the cleanest large-scale example of preserved 19th-century Cape Cod coastal landscape: the Marconi Beach high dunes, the Atlantic White Cedar Swamp boardwalk loop, and the Pilgrim Heights pitch-pine forest are essentially unchanged from photographs taken in the 1880s.

Barnstable County's 396 sq mi wrap the entire Cape Cod peninsula from the Sagamore Bridge across the Cape Cod Canal at the southwest entrance north and east to Provincetown at the Cape's curled tip, with fifteen Cape towns each operating under independent town-meeting government and zoning. The annual seasonal population swing pushes the Cape from 230,000 year-round residents to roughly 600,000 peak summer weekenders per Cape Cod Commission planning estimates. Nickerson State Park in Brewster (the largest public RV-friendly campground on the Cape, 400 sites accepting rigs to 40 ft with electric hookups on 8 freshwater kettle ponds) is the canonical state-park RV-friendly base; reservations open 9 months ahead on the ReserveAmerica MA platform and sell out within minutes for July and August. Cape towns prohibit overnight RV street parking under uniform Cape town codes. Cape Cod National Seashore enforces designated-campground-only RV use; the seashore itself has no RV-friendly campground. Commercial RV-friendly parks line MA-6A and the US-6 spine. The Steamship Authority Hyannis-Nantucket terminal is the only RV-impractical ferry departure on the Cape.