Newport’s Cliff Walk captures the city’s essence: waves and rock to your left, Gilded Age showpieces to your right. The public path runs about three and a half miles along the eastern shore and was named a National Recreation Trail in 1975, the sixty fifth in the United States and the first in New England.
The northern section from Memorial Boulevard at Easton’s Beach to Narragansett Avenue at Forty Steps is paved and has no stairs, although width and grade vary and parts do not meet ADA standards. Farther south the surface shifts to ledge, crushed stone, and uneven rock, so comfortable shoes are smart.
Start where the logistics work for you. Memorial Boulevard offers metered parking, seasonal restrooms, and that smoother start to Forty Steps. Narragansett Avenue is a popular mid entry with facilities. You can also step on at Ruggles Avenue, Marine Avenue, or Ledge Road. Webster Street is stairs only, not a full-service access. The walk is free, open sunrise to sunset, and dogs must be leashed; restrooms and water are seasonal and limited to Easton’s Beach and Forty Steps, so pack what you need.
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Architecture shares top billing with the ocean. Ochre Court, now part of Salve Regina University, is the second largest mansion in Newport. The Breakers, built for Cornelius Vanderbilt II from 1893 to 1895, contains seventy rooms on a thirteen acre parcel. Marble House, completed in 1892, was William K. Vanderbilt’s thirty ninth birthday present to Alva; the Chinese Tea House behind it was added from 1912 to 1914 by the firm Hunt and Hunt. Rosecliff, modeled after the Grand Trianon, includes the largest ballroom in Newport. Rough Point, once the home of Doris Duke, sits on an Olmsted legacy landscape with sweeping Atlantic views near the southern end.
Useful extras: sixteen trail markers with QR codes were installed in 2015 to deliver quick mansion and geology notes to your phone. Plan on roughly two and a half hours if you walk the full route without many stops. Stay on the marked path, mind the steep drops, and remember that services thin out once you leave the main entry points.
With a little planning, this seaside right of way becomes an effortless photo reel of surf, stone, and palazzo scale grandeur.
