Pastel historic houses along a cobblestone street in Charleston, South Carolina

← United States

South Carolina

"Low country grace, from cobbled streets to cypress swamps."

South Carolina distills the Deep South into its most gracious form, where antebellum streets give way to moss-draped swamps and the low country stretches toward the sea. It is a place of slow charm, rich history, and cuisine worth crossing the country for.

PierreWords

South Carolina moves at the unhurried pace of the low country, a state where Spanish moss drips from the live oaks and the afternoon heat encourages a certain philosophical calm. It is one of the oldest and most storied corners of the American South, a place where the beauty of the landscape and the weight of history are inseparably intertwined, and where hospitality is practiced as something close to an art form.

Charleston is the undisputed star, routinely and rightly named among the most beautiful cities in the country. Its peninsula of pastel townhouses, wrought-iron gates, and cobblestone lanes preserves the architecture of centuries past, while its restaurants have made it a genuine culinary capital, reinventing low-country classics with skill and reverence. Yet the city does not shy from the harder chapters of its past, and its museums and historic sites offer an honest reckoning with the story of slavery on which its early wealth was built.

Beyond the coast, the state opens into a wilder register at Congaree, where one of the last great tracts of old-growth bottomland forest in the country stands protected as a national park. Towering bald cypresses rise from the floodplain, their knees breaking the tea-colored water, and boardwalks lead visitors into a primeval world of owls, otters, and light filtering through an ancient canopy.

Between the polished elegance of the coast and the untamed heart of the swamp lies the essential appeal of South Carolina, a state that never rushes, never forgets, and always sends its visitors home a little more relaxed and a good deal better fed than when they arrived.

Explore

Places in South Carolina

Aiken

Aiken

A South Carolina horse town where sandy unpaved streets are protected by law for the sake of equine hooves and Gilded Age winter colonists once escaped northern cold to ride, hunt, and play polo. Lia and I arrived expecting a quiet stopover and left having watched a full afternoon of thoroughbreds training at dawn.

Beaufort

Beaufort

A Lowcountry town of antebellum mansions and live oaks dripping with Spanish moss, wrapped by tidal marsh the color of old brass. Lia and I arrived expecting a museum piece and instead found a working waterfront town, still salty, still slow, still humming with cicadas long after dark.

Bluffton

Bluffton

A May River bluff town that somehow survived getting swallowed by Hilton Head's sprawl, keeping its oyster-roast pace and live-oak canopy intact. Lia and I ate our body weight in local clams at a shack on the water and left with sunburned necks and no regrets.

Camden

Camden

South Carolina's oldest inland town, where Revolutionary War battlefields sit quietly beside steeplechase pastures and a horse culture that has never faded. Lia and I came expecting a small historic detour and instead found ourselves at dawn among Thoroughbreds training on dew-soaked training tracks.

Charleston

Charleston

A romantic South Carolina port where pastel row houses lean over cobblestone lanes and the marshes breathe salt into every evening. Church steeples still set the skyline, and the low tide carries the smell of pluff mud and jasmine. Charleston moves at the speed of a porch swing.

Cheraw

Cheraw

A Pee Dee River town built around a colonial green, best known as the birthplace of Dizzy Gillespie, whose bent-bell trumpet still shows up in bronze on Market Street. Lia hummed bebop the rest of the drive and I couldn't get it out of my head either.

Clemson

Clemson

A lakeside college town on Hartwell's shoreline that turns orange every fall Saturday and goes back to quiet paddling and porch coffee the rest of the week. Lia and I timed our visit for a non-game weekend on purpose and still heard the fight song from a passing car stereo.

Columbia

Columbia

South Carolina's capital, where a gold-domed statehouse still bears Civil War cannon scars and a riverfront of old textile mills has been reborn as a walkable arts district. Lia and I spent a long weekend tracing that contrast, from bronze stars marking Sherman's shellfire to craft breweries humming in converted cotton warehouses.

Congaree

Congaree

A South Carolina floodplain of towering old-growth bottomland hardwoods, some of the tallest trees in the eastern United States. It is a hushed, humid, water-laced cathedral of a forest, and in early summer its fireflies pulse in unison.

Edisto Island

Edisto Island

A slow, unbridged sea island where the beach houses are still mostly single-family and the only real nightlife is the sound of the surf. Lia and I came for a weekend of shark-tooth hunting and stayed an extra day just to keep doing nothing.

Folly Beach

Folly Beach

Charleston's scrappy barrier-island beach town, self-styled the Edge of America, where surfboards outnumber golf carts and the pace is set by tide charts, not tee times. Lia and I watched the sun set behind a shipwrecked pier and ate fish tacos with sand still on our feet.

Georgetown

Georgetown

South Carolina's third-oldest city, built on the fortunes of colonial rice plantations and still facing the wide water of Winyah Bay, where a working steel mill and a wooden Harborwalk somehow share the same waterfront. Lia and I came for a two-hour stop between Charleston and Myrtle Beach and stayed until the streetlights came on.

Greenville

Greenville

An Upstate South Carolina city built quite literally around a waterfall, its revitalized downtown threading gardens, art, and Southern cooking along the banks of the Reedy River. Lia and I came for a weekend and kept finding reasons to extend it by another meal.

Hilton Head Island

Hilton Head Island

A low-lying South Carolina barrier island where maritime forest, marsh, and twelve miles of hard-packed sand meet under a canopy of ancient live oaks. Lia and I biked its shaded lanes at golden hour and understood at once why so many people never leave once they've arrived.

Myrtle Beach

Myrtle Beach

A sixty-mile arc of the Grand Strand where beach towers, mini-golf courses, and pancake houses crowd right up to the sand. Lia and I came skeptical of the neon and stayed for the wide beach, the Boardwalk's SkyWheel views, and the shag-dancing bars that still play Carolina beach music till closing.

Pawleys Island

Pawleys Island

A four-mile barrier island that's proud of calling itself arrogantly shabby, where rope hammocks were invented and nobody's in a hurry to modernize anything. Lia and I napped in one of those hammocks so long we missed our own dinner reservation and didn't mind at all.

Rock Hill

Rock Hill

A Catawba River mill town just south of Charlotte that traded cotton dust for cycling lanes and outdoor sculpture. Lia and I came for one night on our way to Congaree and ended up staying two, mostly because of the fig cake at a bakery neither of us can stop talking about.

Spartanburg

Spartanburg

The self-declared Hub City of the Upstate, where old textile money built handsome squares and a new wave of breweries and music venues moved into the leftover warehouses. Lia and I stumbled on it between Asheville and Charleston and stayed long enough for two rounds at RJ Rockers.

Sumter

Sumter

A Midlands city built around a garden where all eight species of swan in the world swim together, which is a strange and lovely enough fact that it justified the detour by itself. Lia counted swans out loud like a checklist and made it through six before giving up.

Walterboro

Walterboro

A slow Lowcountry crossroads town that calls itself the Front Porch of the Lowcountry, full of antique shops and a boardwalk through cypress swamp. Lia and I broke up the drive from Charleston to Savannah here and ended up spending an hour longer than planned on the swamp trail alone.

Keep exploring

More from United States

South Dakota

South Dakota

South Dakota is a state of monumental landscapes and larger-than-life legends, where granite presidents gaze out from the Black Hills and the badlands ripple in eroded waves. It is the American West at its most mythic and its most wild.

Tennessee

Tennessee

A state stretched like a song between the Mississippi and the Blue Ridge, Tennessee runs on rhythm and river mist. Its cities keep the country's musical heartbeat while its mountains hold the oldest, softest light in the East.

Texas

Texas

Texas is less a state than a country of its own imagining, sprawling from piney east to desert west across distances that humble the odometer. It holds cattle-drive myth and space-age ambition, taco stands and star-strewn skies, all under a sky that never seems to end.

Utah

Utah

Utah is the American Southwest at its most operatic, a state carved by wind and water into arches, hoodoos, and canyons that defy easy belief. Between the red-rock theatre of the south and the snow-capped Wasatch of the north, it is a landscape built for wonder.

Vermont

Vermont

Vermont is New England distilled to its most pastoral essence, a state of green mountains, white steeples, and covered bridges spanning cold clear rivers. Small and unhurried, it turns the seasons into events, none more famous than its autumn blaze.

Virginia

Virginia

Virginia holds four centuries of American history in its soil and a spine of blue mountains along its western edge. From tidewater capitals to the misted crests of the Blue Ridge, it is a state where the past and the wild sit comfortably side by side.

All of United States