Nanshan and Shekou: Shenzhen Bay, the Ferry Port and Nantou Old Town

The ground Shenzhen was administered from for most of the last seventeen hundred years, and since 2020 a redeveloped design quarter built on top of it. The rampart is real: Nanshan district's cultural bureau dates the surviving walled town to 1394, when it was the garrison seat of the Dongguan Guard, and Guangdong province listed the wall as a provincial protected monument in July 2002. The south gate still stands at its original height, 10 m wide and 4.5 m high, with the two characters Ningnan cut in seal script into the stone above the arch. Everything between the gates, however, was a dense urban village until the district government and Vanke started work in 2019 and reopened the north-south street in August 2020: the lanes are the old lanes, but the shopfronts are new. Free to walk in at any hour; the museum inside keeps 10:00-17:00 and shuts on Mondays.

A French ocean liner sitting on a beach that is no longer a beach, with a shopping and restaurant quarter grown around it - and the closest thing Shenzhen has to a foreign quarter. The ship is the Minghua, launched at Saint-Nazaire in 1962 as the Ancerville with President de Gaulle cutting the ribbon, bought by China in 1973 on Zhou Enlai's authorisation, and grounded at Shekou in November 1983 for want of a hotel. Deng Xiaoping came aboard in January 1984 and wrote the four characters that became the place's name. After a 1,000-day refit the ship reopened on 1 October 2025 as something new: half of it is now a 4,600 sqm immersive theatre with a resident physical-theatre production, the other half food and retail. Around it, plazas of bars and restaurants that stay open later than almost anywhere else in the city.

Thirteen kilometres of free waterfront with the hills of Hong Kong on the far side of the water, open 06:00-23:00 and made of two parks joined end to end: the Mangrove Coastal Ecological Park, opened December 2000 on land reclaimed for Binhai Avenue, and the Shenzhen Bay Coastal Leisure Belt of 2011. The city parks bureau counts 128.74 hectares and fourteen themed sections strung along the shore - the mangrove park itself, Zhongwan Yuehai Square, Haiyun Garden, Bailupo, Beiwan Lugang, Xiaosha Hill, the 2011 Universiade torch tower, Liuhua Hill, Crescent Valley, Sunrise Theatre, the tidal wetland, the wedding plaza, the viewing pier and the sports plaza - all linked by one continuous walking and cycling system. It is a shore to look at, not to swim from: part of the bay is a year-round no-fishing zone, the mudflats are a feeding ground on the East Asian-Australasian flyway, and the national nature reserve begins at its eastern end.

The company museum of the firm that built Shekou, and by some distance the best single room in Shenzhen for understanding why this end of the city exists. China Merchants was founded in 1872 as the first modern Chinese-owned industrial and commercial enterprise of the self-strengthening era; in 1979 its Hong Kong arm broke ground on the Shekou Industrial Zone, the first piece of the reform era. Since 26 December 2022 it has been in a new building on top of Weibo Hill above the ferry port, where the permanent exhibition, A Century of Striving, a Merchant's Dream, walks through more than 150 years of the company in chronological order, with period objects, documents and scale models. No booking, and closed Sundays.

The southern tip of the Shekou peninsula, where the Pearl River meets the sea, and the two things the sea put there. The temple to Tianhou - Mazu, the sea goddess - backs onto Xiaonanshan with the Lingding estuary in front of it; the city runs it as the Tianhou Museum, a branch of Nanshan Museum, on 28,000 sqm with five exhibition halls and free admission, Tuesday to Sunday 09:00-16:00. It was rebuilt on Ming imperial order and was the largest and most influential Tianhou temple on the south China coast under the Ming and Qing. The ritual performed here, cisha, is a provincial intangible heritage item: envoys sailing for Southeast Asia sacrificed an ox, a pig and a goat on the sand before departure and sank them in the sea. On Yingzuishan about a kilometre to the south, the Left Fort, built in the Kangxi reign, still holds one iron gun and China's largest bronze statue of Lin Zexu.

The free version of a paid observation deck: 336 metres of low hill at the tip of the Shekou peninsula, an hour up and down on stepped paths, and from the top you see the whole of Shenzhen Bay at once - the towers of the city centre one way, the ridges of Hong Kong's Lau Fau Shan across the water the other, the Shekou terminal and the Shenzhen Bay Bridge below. The city parks bureau lists it as Nanshan Park, 351 hectares over two summits, Dananshan at 336 m and Guishan at 275 m. Open 06:00-21:00, free, no ticket and nothing to book. The park's own recommended route runs from the Bieshu trailhead, 560 m from Sea World metro station, up past the mid-slope viewing platform and three pavilions and down the steeper Customs trailhead.

One of the newest pieces of Shenzhen, built on reclaimed land, where you can stand at the foot of a skyline that is still being assembled. Two things here are finished and free. The Guiwan-section waterfront at Qianhai Stone Park reopened to the public in 2025 after a seawall and landscape rebuild across 17,200 sqm: a 180 m granite grandstand that seats about 800, a 260 m seawall terrace seating 2,200, a 640 m promenade, a 3,600 sqm artificial sand pit with a 480 m gravel shoreline, and a 14,000 sqm lawn behind it. Inland, Qianhai Guiwan Park runs 1.9 km along the district's central axis, 45 hectares with a quarter of it water, open 06:00-23:00. Everything else you can see from here is a construction programme, and that is the point of coming.

Shenzhen's sea door: fast ferries to Hong Kong International Airport, Hong Kong Island, Macau and Zhuhai, run by the China Merchants group whose predecessor built Shekou in 1979. Two reasons it matters more than its size suggests. It is one of only two ports in Shenzhen where 240-hour visa-free transit applies - the other is Bao'an airport - so for a traveller on a through ticket to a third country this is a legitimate way into China without a visa. And the Hong Kong airport route is a sealed transfer: you clear mainland exit once, cross in 30 minutes to the airport's SkyPier, and never pass Hong Kong immigration at all, which also means it cannot be used to get into Hong Kong itself. Passenger clearance runs 07:00-22:30. The check-in desks for the airport route work 06:00-20:30; the operator's own pages give the cut-off as 45 or 30 minutes before sailing, so follow what your booking page says on the day.

The crossing you use if you are coming by road from Hong Kong airport or the Hong Kong side of the border, and the one where both sets of officers sit in the same building on the Shenzhen side. It opened on 1 July 2007 as the country's first land crossing run on the co-location model: your bus drives over the 5.5 km Shenzhen Bay Bridge, parks once, and you clear Hong Kong departure and mainland entry in the same building without getting back on the coach in between. Passenger clearance runs 06:30-24:00 and the freight lanes never close; the port office counts 62 outbound and 55 inbound passenger lanes. Two things this crossing cannot do for you. It is not on the list of ports where 240-hour visa-free transit applies - in Shenzhen that is Bao'an airport and Shekou passenger port only - and the face-scan smart lanes piloted here list mainland, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan travel documents, with no foreign passport among them. Metro Line 13 has reached the port since 28 December 2024.

A stadium, an arena and a swimming hall under one white steel net - the first time that was attempted in China - built for the 2011 Summer Universiade and known ever since by the nickname Spring Cocoon. The design came from an international call launched in early July 2007 to which 52 practices responded; the commission went to a joint scheme by Japan's Axs Satow and the Beijing Institute of Architectural Design, and the Universiade's own archive records it as the scheme that was carried out. It has no gate and no general admission: four sides open onto gentle ramps you simply walk up, which was the point of the design, and the east end was cut away into a 120 m viewing bridge so that you can see Shenzhen Bay and the Hong Kong hills from inside the stadium. What it is, practically, is the answer to 'is anything on tonight' - the city's main concert and match venue - plus a piece of architecture you can walk into for nothing on the way along the bay.

A drive-and-walk zoo on a hillside by Xili Lake, rated a national 4A attraction in 2011 and the most practical full day in Shenzhen if you are travelling with children. Gates open 09:30 and the park closes at 18:00, with ticket sales and admission stopping at 17:00 and security sweeping the grounds around 18:30. The park is laid out as one long route past roughly fifty enclosures, from the wetland garden at the entrance through the gibbon islands, the African section, the hippos and zebras, the rainforest aviary, the pandas and the predator valley, to an amusement area and a dinosaur section at the exit; an aquarium wing and marine section sit in the middle. It also stages what it calls animal-behaviour shows - decide for yourself whether you want those, and note the walking is genuinely hilly.

A 77-hectare municipal park built around a 30-hectare inner lake, opened on 1 November 2017 and, the city says, the first park in China themed on talent itself - academicians' groves, a wall of names, a star bridge, a hall for lectures. What it is actually good for is the view. Stand on the lake edge at dusk with the Houhai towers behind the water and the Shenzhen Bay Bridge off to the south, and you have the single most photographed composition in west Shenzhen, reachable by metro and costing nothing. Open 06:00-23:00. It adjoins Shenzhen Bay Park but is a separate park with a separate name, its own entrance and its own management - worth knowing when you are telling a driver where to stop.