Things to do in Charleston

Landmark · The southern tip of the peninsula

The seawall promenade where the Ashley and Cooper meet, with the antebellum houses of South of Broad behind it and Fort Sumter out in the harbour.

Local tip: Walk it at high tide on a king tide day and you will understand the city's whole engineering problem in ten minutes — the harbour comes up level with the promenade and the drains run backwards.

Culture · Gadsden's Wharf, on the Cooper River

Opened in 2023 on the wharf where a very large share of enslaved Africans first landed in North America, raised on pillars so the ground itself stays untouched.

Local tip: Go before any of the plantation houses, not after. It reframes everything else you will see here, and the African Ancestors Memorial Garden outside is free to walk through.

Culture · James Island, ten minutes from downtown

A Sea Island cotton plantation interpreted from the perspective of the enslaved people who worked it and of the Gullah Geechee community that lived in its cabins into the 1990s.

Local tip: This is the one to choose if you only do one. The row of cabins was occupied within living memory, which does more to collapse the distance than any exhibit.

Nature · Johns Island, 40 minutes south-west

A Southern live oak with a canopy spreading over 17,000 square feet, its limbs resting on the ground and rising again. Estimates of its age run to several centuries.

Local tip: Free, and best on a weekday morning before the coach parties. Combine it with the farm stands on Johns Island — this is still working agricultural land, five miles from a $2,000 studio.

Landmark · Between downtown and Mount Pleasant

A cable-stayed span over the Cooper River with a separated pedestrian and cycle lane running its full length.

Local tip: The lane is a genuine piece of transport infrastructure, not a viewpoint — people commute over it. Run or ride it at sunrise; the wind at the top is a lot stronger than it looks from the ground.

Food · Mount Pleasant, across the bridge

A working shrimp-boat creek with a boardwalk, restaurants on stilts and dolphins in the channel, next to the oldest part of Mount Pleasant.

Local tip: The tourist version is the boardwalk bars. The better version is buying shrimp off the boats at the docks in season, then walking Pitt Street in the Old Village at dusk out to the old bridge pier.