Provincetown

This is the strongest single reason to come to Provincetown, and it is the reason the town's small bookable market is worth paying attention to at all.

Stellwagen Bank is a submerged glacial deposit at the mouth of Massachusetts Bay, designated a national marine sanctuary in November 1992 and covering roughly 842 square miles. It sits about five miles north of this harbour, which is the shortest run to serious whale ground anywhere on the American East Coast. From Provincetown you are on the feeding grounds within half an hour, where boats leaving from further south spend an hour and a half getting there.

Humpbacks are the headline and the reason the trips work: surface-active, breaching, lunge-feeding through bait balls, and individually named and catalogued animals returning year after year. Finbacks, the second-largest animal on earth, are common, and minkes are frequent. North Atlantic right whales pass through Cape Cod Bay in late winter and spring, in numbers that matter to a species down to a few hundred animals.

The season runs roughly April to October, and the rules are federal rather than advisory. Vessels may not approach a North Atlantic right whale within 500 yards, which is law and not discretion, and the recommended distance from other whales in these waters is far closer to a hundred feet than the photograph in the brochure suggests. Reputable operators carry a naturalist, often working with the local research community, and will tell you what they can and cannot do rather than chasing an animal for a better shot.

Book the earliest sailing. Wind builds across Massachusetts Bay through the afternoon, morning trips cancel less often, and a flat outbound run changes how the three or four hours feel. Take more layers than the beach temperature suggests; it is consistently colder out there.

One street does most of the work here, and it changes character three times along its length.

The East End is the gallery district. This is where the serious commercial art is, in converted houses and old net lofts, and where you will find the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, which has been collecting the town's own output since the 1910s. Friday evenings in season, the galleries open late and the street fills with people walking from one to the next with a glass in hand. It is unpretentious in a way the phrase gallery crawl does not suggest.

The centre, around MacMillan Pier and Lopes Square, is the loud part: T-shirt shops, fudge, buskers, drag performers selling tickets to their own shows outside their own venues, the ferry disgorging a hundred and fifty people at a time, and the best people-watching in Massachusetts. Some visitors find it too much. Walk two hundred yards in either direction and it stops.

The West End is residential and quieter, with the prettiest houses, the white picket fences, the small guesthouses, and at the far end the breakwater across the tidal flats.

Off the street, the town rises steeply. The Pilgrim Monument stands on High Pole Hill above the centre, and from the top the whole hook of the Cape is laid out below you, which is the clearest lesson in local geography available anywhere on the peninsula.

A note on money. Provincetown in season is expensive: dinner, a room and a parking space all cost more here than anywhere else on the Cape. The town is also full of things that cost nothing, including the harbour, the beaches, the west end breakwater and the art in the windows.

Every American schoolchild learns that the Mayflower landed at Plymouth. It did not land there first. It made landfall at the tip of Cape Cod in November 1620, anchored in this harbour, and the passengers spent five weeks here before moving across the bay. The Mayflower Compact was signed aboard ship in these waters. Plymouth got the rock; Provincetown got a very large tower about it, three hundred years later.

The Pilgrim Monument is 252 feet and seven and a half inches of granite standing on a hill that is already 100 feet above the sea, which makes it visible from an extraordinary distance across the bay and from most of the Outer Cape. Construction ran from 1907 to 1910; Theodore Roosevelt laid the cornerstone and Taft dedicated the finished tower. It is described as the tallest all-granite structure in the United States, and its model is a bell tower in Siena, which explains why it looks so unlike anything else on this coast.

You climb it on interior ramps rather than stairs, with short flights of steps between them, which makes it far more manageable than its height suggests. The view from the top is the single most useful thing a first-time visitor can do here: the whole curl of the Cape, the dunes, Long Point, the harbour, the bay and, on a clear day, the Boston skyline.

The Provincetown Museum at the base is small and good, and it covers the maritime town, the Arctic expeditions of Donald MacMillan, who was born here and whose name is on the pier, and the art colony. Hours are seasonal and the monument closes in deep winter, so check before you drive out for it.

Provincetown has two National Seashore beaches and they face different directions, which is the most useful thing to know about them.

Race Point faces north and east into open Atlantic. The water is cold, the surf is real, the beach is enormous, and because the Cape has curled round on itself this is one of the few places on the East Coast where you can watch the sun set over the ocean from an east-facing shore. Whales are sometimes visible from the sand here. There is a lifeguarded season, a bathhouse, and a long walk from the lot at the busiest times.

Herring Cove faces west across the bay, which makes it the sunset beach and the calmer swim. The water is still cold by the standards of anywhere south of here. The northern end is the traditional gay beach and has been for decades.

Behind both, the Province Lands are a rolling desert of parabolic dunes held together by beach grass and pitch pine, with a visitor centre on the ridge and an observation deck that is worth the detour on its own. Scattered through them, in the Peaked Hill Bars Historic District, stand the dune shacks: primitive one-room huts, some over a century old, which sheltered surfmen and later writers, and which are still let to artists under permit. You can walk out to see them from a distance. Do not treat them as a public attraction, and do not walk on the grassed dunes, which are what stops the whole system moving.

Two hard rules on the outer shore. White sharks are present along this coast through the warm months, following the seals, so read the flags and leave the water at once if a lifeguard clears it. And the surf is more powerful than the bay-side Cape prepares you for.

The very end of Cape Cod is a thin hook of sand with a lighthouse on it, and you can walk there.

From the far west end of Commercial Street, a stone breakwater runs roughly a mile across the tidal flats to the base of the hook. It is built of large granite blocks, uneven, sometimes wet and slippery, and it takes most people thirty to forty-five minutes each way just to cross. From the far side it is another walk over soft sand to Long Point Light and Wood End Light. Allow three hours for the whole thing, take water, and check the tide, because parts of the flats either side flood and the walk back in the dark on wet granite is unpleasant.

The easier option is the seasonal shuttle boat that runs across the harbour from MacMillan Pier and drops you on the point, which turns a half-day expedition into an hour. Many people walk one way and take the boat the other, which is the sensible compromise.

What is out there is essentially nothing, and that is the attraction: a beach on both sides, two lighthouses, terns, and the town seen across the water from the outside. There is no shade, no water and no facilities. In summer this is a genuinely hot, exposed walk.

Long Point also has a quiet piece of history attached. There was a small settlement out on the point in the nineteenth century, with houses, a school and a saltworks, and when it was abandoned several of the houses were floated across the harbour on barrels and reassembled in the west end of town. Some of them carry small blue plaques to say so.