False Cape State Park occupies four thousand three hundred twenty-one acres on the isolated Currituck Banks Peninsula at Virginia Beach’s southern edge, between Back Bay and the Atlantic. Its name reflects a dangerous coast where mariners mistook the low shoreline for Cape Henry or other approaches, leading to wrecks on shoals and sandbars along the Graveyard of the Atlantic. That harsh setting gave rise to Wash Woods, a settlement of shipwreck survivors whose residents lived by fishing, farming, salvage, guiding, and rescue work. The area also preserves traces of colonial boundary surveying, a deadly eighteen century wreck, a World War Two German landing, and a remarkably undeveloped coastal landscape.