Things to Do in Charleston: A Complete Guide

Charleston sits on a peninsula where the Ashley and Cooper rivers meet before emptying into the Atlantic, a geography that shaped everything from its colonial-era wealth to the way its streets flood on a king tide afternoon. Founded in 1670 as Charles Town, it became the wealthiest city in colonial British North America on the back of rice, indigo, and the slave trade: a history the city no longer sidesteps, with the International African American Museum now standing on Gadsden's Wharf, the site where nearly half of all enslaved Africans entered North America. That tension between beauty and brutality is the thing that makes Charleston unlike Savannah or New Orleans, cities it gets lazily compared to. The peninsula below Broad Street, which locals call South of Broad, holds the pastel-painted single houses turned sideways to catch the prevailing breeze off the harbor, their piazzas stacked two or three stories deep. North of Calhoun, the Upper Peninsula has shifted from industrial to residential in the past decade, with breweries and taco shops replacing body shops along upper Meeting Street. Across the Cooper River bridge, Mount Pleasant supplies the shrimp boats at Shem Creek; across the Ashley, West Ashley and James Island feel like their own small towns with strip-mall Vietnamese restaurants that outperform most of the downtown prix fixe menus. A first-timer's day has a natural rhythm: morning at the downtown market hall, which has sold sweetgrass baskets since the 1800s, then a walk through the French Quarter's narrow alleys where jasmine and Confederate jasmine compete in April, and an evening on one of the rooftop bars along East Bay where the sun drops behind the steeple skyline that gave Charleston its old nickname, the Holy City, earned honestly with more than four hundred congregations packed into roughly fifteen square miles.