The 15 Best Things to Do in Tampa Bay (2026 Local Guide)

Reynolds and Eleanor Morse spent forty years befriending Salvador Dalí and buying his work, and the whole collection landed here: 96 oil paintings, more than 1,300 graphics, and five of the wall-sized "masterworks" that took Dalí about a year each. Only the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres, Spain holds more. The "Enigma" glass shell bulging off the front is worth the walk-up on its own.

St. Petersburg tore down its dated inverted-pyramid pier and opened this 26-acre waterfront district in 2020: five restaurants, an environmental education center, a playground, and public art jutting out into Tampa Bay. It's a free place to walk, eat, and watch the water, and it reanchored downtown St. Pete's waterfront. Not a "do" so much as a place to spend an easy few hours.

In Oldsmar on the edge of Tampa Bay, Empower Adventures runs five ziplines totaling 3,000 feet at up to 65 feet up, threading across 400 acres of mangrove estuary — plus a high ropes course, a ninja-warrior course, and a "Leap of Faith." It's open to ages 7 and up, and it's the closest thing to a wilderness adventure park inside the metro.

Curtis Hixon opened in 2010 as the green center of downtown Tampa: 8 acres on the Hillsborough River, plugged into the 2.4-mile Riverwalk, with a dog park, a big playground, a splash fountain, and an amphitheater that hosts near-constant festivals. It's ringed by the Tampa Museum of Art and the Glazer Children's Museum, so it anchors an easy free-or-cheap downtown day.

Vinoy Park is 11.6 acres of open bayfront lawn on downtown St. Petersburg's waterfront, named for the historic 1925 Vinoy hotel beside it. Most days it's a green space with Tampa Bay views; on festival weekends it's the city's main outdoor stage — Ribfest, the Tampa Bay Blues Festival, art shows, and triathlons all land here. Free to wander, and the setting is hard to beat.

Opened in 1987 on the Hillsborough River, the Straz is a 335,000-square-foot, five-theater complex — the second-largest of its kind in the Southeast — anchored by the 2,610-seat Carol Morsani Hall. It runs a leading Broadway series and is one of the few US centers that produces its own grand opera, drawing about 600,000 guests a year. This is downtown Tampa's marquee night out.

Just north of Raymond James Stadium, Al Lopez Park is Tampa's large central green space, renamed in 1992 for Al López — the first Tampa native to play in, and manage, Major League Baseball, and to reach the Hall of Fame. It's a locals' park of lakes, shade, and open ground rather than a tourist stop, and an easy free break near the stadium district.

Open since 1982 on the Hillsborough River, Lettuce Lake Park is 240 acres of genuine Florida wetland: boardwalks winding through cypress domes and floodplain, an observation tower over the marsh, nature trails, and an Audubon center. It's where Tampa goes to see herons, turtles, and the occasional gator without leaving the city — a quiet, cheap nature break.

Jannus Live (formerly Jannus Landing) is a roughly 2,000-capacity open-air music venue tucked in a brick courtyard in downtown St. Petersburg's historic district. Running since 1984 and named for aviator Tony Jannus, it's one of the Tampa Bay area's signature outdoor stages — the Red Hot Chili Peppers played an early mainstream show here in 1987. Standing-room, intimate, and all about the live set.

Opened in 2010 on Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park, the Glazer Children's Museum is 53,000 square feet of interactive, themed play zones aimed squarely at younger kids — water tables, a mock airport and vet clinic, climbing structures. Right on the Riverwalk beside the Tampa Museum of Art, it's the anchor of a very kid-friendly downtown stretch.

Brothers Chris and Ryan Zubrick built this in St. Petersburg's EDGE District: a 70-minute show blending close-up sleight-of-hand with grand-scale illusions inside a small room decorated in black, gold, and purple. Shows run Thursday evenings, Friday-Saturday nights, and Sunday matinees, and the theatre skips kids three and under, so it works as easily for a date night as a family outing.

MOSI is Tampa's big hands-on science museum: 190,000 square feet built around Florida's IMAX Dome theater and the Saunders Planetarium, with interactive zones on weather, the human body, and STEAM. It was the largest science center in the Southeast and fifth-largest in the US. It's the go-to indoor, brainy option for a rainy or scorching Tampa day with kids.

Drew Marc Gallery rotates exhibitions of nationally collected and internationally exhibited artists alongside Tampa Bay talent. If you actually care about contemporary art rather than gallery-as-backdrop, the curation here skews serious: museum-collected work, not decorative filler. The owner's vision is explicit—putting Tampa on the global art map, not just the local one.

You're here if you want to see what local painters, sculptors, and jewelry makers actually make—not what galleries think will sell. The space hosts rotating exhibitions, artist demos, and calls for entries to juried shows with real prizes. It's a 501(c)3 mission-driven operation, which means the work on the walls matters more than the margin.

The Werk Gallery is a working artist collective and retail space, not a passive viewing room—you're watching people make things, not just looking at finished work behind glass. It's part gallery, part gift shop, part studio, which means the energy shifts depending on who's in. Go if you want to buy directly from makers or understand how St. Petersburg's art scene actually functions outside the downtown gallery circuit.