Things to Do in Richmond in March

The RVATukTuk Sightseeing Tour of Richmond puts you in an open-air, three-wheeled vehicle that threads through neighborhoods a bus could never reach. The narrow alleys behind Tobacco Row warehouses. The steep switchbacks of Church Hill where you can hear gravel popping under the tires. The riverside overlooks where the smell of damp red clay mixes with honeysuckle just starting to bud. Your driver narrates with the casual authority of someone who has lived every block, pointing out Civil War-era ironwork, Prohibition-era speakeasy entrances, and the exact corner where a famous duel was fought, all while the cool March wind whips through the open cabin. The compact vehicle means you cover ground fast but stop often, pulling over wherever the view or the story demands attention.

The Church Hill Food Tour with Discover Richmond Tours walks you through one of the oldest residential neighborhoods in Virginia, where the houses lean slightly on their foundations and the smell of slow-braised pork or fresh-baked cornbread drifts from doorways that have been feeding neighbors since before the Civil War. Each stop is a working kitchen, not a tourist-facing tasting room. You eat what the chefs are cooking that day, which in March means hearty, transitional dishes: root vegetable soups, house-cured charcuterie, thick slices of sweet potato pie still warm from the oven. Between bites, the guide fills in Church Hill's layered past, from Patrick Henry's "Liberty or Death" speech at St. John's Church to the contemporary artists and restaurateurs who have made these blocks one of Richmond's most compelling eating neighborhoods.

The Historic Trolley Tour rolls through Richmond on a replica streetcar that follows the bones of the old transit lines, passing the Virginia State Capitol designed by Thomas Jefferson, the cast-iron storefronts of Shockoe Slip where gaslight-era hardware still hangs above the doors, and the silent enormity of Hollywood Cemetery, where two U.S. presidents lie beneath granite obelisks overlooking the rapids of the James. The trolley's open windows let in the cool March air and the sound of church bells from a half-dozen steeples, and the narration, delivered live, not recorded, lingers on the details that give Richmond its texture: why the streets are laid out the way they are, which buildings survived the Evacuation Fire of 1865, where the tobacco warehouses stood that made the city rich. It is a survey course in a city that rewards depth, and a useful orientation for anyone arriving with only a few days.

The Richmond Ghost Tour through Shockoe Bottom drops you into the oldest commercial district in the city after dark, when the cobblestones are slick from an afternoon rain and the gas-replica streetlamps throw long shadows against brick walls that predate the Republic. The guide steers the group through the district's grimmer chapters: the slave trade that once operated openly on these blocks, the Great Richmond Theatre Fire of 1811 that killed seventy-two people in a single evening, the floods that swept bodies from the burial grounds along the creek. You will hear the creak of old timbers overhead, smell the damp stone of alley walls, and feel the particular chill that rises from below-grade doorways where the city's oldest foundations sit half-buried. This is not a campy haunted-house walk. It is a serious, atmospheric telling of the violence and loss that shaped a neighborhood still reckoning with its past.

Hiking the James River in Richmond with Discover Richmond Tours takes you along the trails that thread through the granite boulders and river birch groves on Belle Isle and the north bank, where the sound of whitewater rapids drowns out the city entirely and the air smells of wet stone and moss. In March, the river runs high and fast from winter rains, and the trail surfaces range from packed dirt to exposed rock shelves that require careful footing. Your guide picks a route calibrated to the group and the water level, pointing out osprey nests being rebuilt in the tall sycamores, Civil War-era gun emplacements half-swallowed by root systems, and the spots where the fall line creates standing waves that kayakers will ride come summer. The James through Richmond is the only urban Class III-IV whitewater run on the East Coast, and even from the bank, the force of the water in March is something you feel in your chest.

The Arts District Food Tour in Richmond with Discover Richmond Tours moves through the blocks around West Broad Street where converted warehouse spaces house some of the most inventive kitchens in the mid-Atlantic. The tasting stops lean contemporary: fermented hot sauces made in-house, wood-fired flatbreads with toppings sourced from Virginia farms, a dessert course built around bourbon and local honey. The guide contextualizes each restaurant within the neighborhood's transformation from industrial corridor to creative hub. You taste the tang of pickled vegetables at one stop, the smoky char of a handmade sausage at the next, and between them you pass murals the size of buildings, letterpress studios with their doors propped open, and the faint turpentine-and-oil smell of working artist spaces. Richmond's food identity is inseparable from its art identity in this district, and this tour treats them as one subject.