Charleston travel guide

Top 10 sights in Charleston

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

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   1© Bubba73 (talk), (Jud McCranie) · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Fort Sumter

   An unfinished sea fort at the mouth of Charleston harbour where Confederate batteries opened fire on 12 April 1861, beginning the Civil War. It is reached only by a thirty-minute ferry from Liberty Square or Patriots Point; nobody was killed in the bombardment itself.

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   USS Yorktown

   An Essex-class aircraft carrier commissioned in 1943, which fought across the Pacific and later recovered the Apollo 8 crew. She has been moored at Patriots Point across the harbour from Charleston as a museum since 1975.

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   H. L. Hunley

   The first submarine to sink a warship in combat: a hand-cranked iron boat some 40 feet long that drove a spar torpedo into the USS Housatonic off Charleston in February 1864, then vanished with all eight men aboard. Raised in 2000, she is conserved in a tank at the Warren Lasch Center.

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4. 

   4© Dima Sergiyenko; Please attribute this image as the work of "DiscoverWithDima." · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Fort Moultrie

   A series of forts on Sullivan's Island, the first of palmetto logs, whose spongy wood absorbed British cannonballs in June 1776 and won the young republic an early victory. The palmetto went onto the state flag for it; Osceola is buried outside the wall.

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   5© Cal Sr from Newport, NC, US · CC BY 2.0

   Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church

   The oldest African Methodist Episcopal congregation in the South, founded in 1817 and closed by the state after Denmark Vesey's planned revolt in 1822, then rebuilt after the Civil War. Nine worshippers including the pastor were murdered at a Bible study here in June 2015.

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   USS Laffey

   An Allen M. Sumner-class destroyer that survived six kamikaze hits and four bombs off Okinawa on 16 April 1945, losing thirty-two men and staying afloat. Known as the ship that would not die, she is moored at Patriots Point as a National Historic Landmark.

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7. 

   7© The original uploader was AlanEisen at English Wikipedia. · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist

   The Catholic cathedral of Charleston, built from 1890 to a design by Patrick Keely in Connecticut brownstone, replacing a church that burned in 1861. Its spire went unbuilt for over a century and was finally added in 2010.

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8. 

   8© Brian Stansberry · CC BY 3.0

   Castle Pinckney

   A small masonry fort of 1810 on Shutes Folly in the harbour, garrisoned only briefly and used mostly as a prison for Union captives in 1861. It has been abandoned since 1878 and is closed to visitors, though the ruin is visible from the ferry to Fort Sumter.

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   Congregation Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim

   A congregation founded in 1749, and the birthplace of Reform Judaism in the United States — members petitioned for English-language services and an organ in 1824. The present Greek Revival building of 1840 is the second oldest synagogue building in the country.

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10. 

    10© ProfReader · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Huguenot Church

    The only Gothic Revival building in Charleston to be designed by Edward Brickell White, of 1845, and the only independent Huguenot congregation left in the United States. A French-language service is held once a year, and Henry Erben's 1845 organ is still played.

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   Fort Wagner

   An earthwork battery on Morris Island covering the southern approach to the harbour, assaulted on 18 July 1863 by the 54th Massachusetts — a Black regiment whose charge cost it nearly half its men. Erosion has taken the site itself under water.

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   2© Nick Amoscato · CC BY 2.0

   Magnolia Plantation and Gardens (Charleston, South Carolina)

   A plantation on the Ashley River held by one family since 1676, whose informal romantic garden was opened to paying visitors in 1870, making it the oldest public garden in America. Four preserved cabins now anchor an exhibition on the people enslaved here.

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   3© Clarinetguy097 · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Patriots Point

   A naval museum at Mount Pleasant across the harbour, built around the carrier USS Yorktown, the destroyer Laffey and the submarine Clamagore. About 300,000 people a year come; the Vietnam Support Base on shore is the only such recreation in the country.

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   4© Brian Stansberry · CC BY 3.0

   Old Slave Mart

   A building at 6 Chalmers Street that housed a slave auction gallery from 1856, after street sales were banned, and is the last such structure left in South Carolina. It is now a city museum, run since 2007 with the auction records on display.

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   5© ProfReader · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Exchange and Provost Building

   A Palladian exchange and custom house of 1767-71 where South Carolina ratified the Constitution and Washington was entertained in 1791. Its cellar held American prisoners under British occupation and, before that, was part of the city's fortification wall.

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   6© The ed17 · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Charles Towne Landing

   A 269-hectare state historic site in West Ashley on the spot where English settlers landed in 1670 and founded Carolina. A replica seventeenth-century trading ketch is moored in the creek, and the animal forest keeps species the colonists would have met.

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   7© Billy Hathorn · CC BY-SA 3.0

   St. Philip's Episcopal Church

   The oldest congregation in Charleston, founded in 1680, in a building of 1838 whose steeple was used as a Confederate signal tower and shelled for it. John C. Calhoun and Charles Pinckney are buried in the churchyards on both sides of the street.

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   8© Making it with the Matthews · CC BY 3.0

   International African American Museum

   A museum opened in June 2023 on Gadsden's Wharf, where about forty per cent of enslaved Africans brought to North America first landed. It is raised on eighteen columns so the ground beneath is left untouched, with a tidal memorial garden under it.

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   9© Brian Stansberry · CC BY 3.0

   French Quarter

   A historic district of downtown Charleston named for the Huguenot merchants who settled it, and the area covered by the first municipal preservation ordinance in the United States, passed in 1931. Its art galleries and the cobbles of Chalmers Street are what draw people now.

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    10© Brian Stansberry (photographer) · CC BY 3.0

    White Point Gardens

    A 2.3-hectare park at the tip of the peninsula, where pirates including Stede Bonnet were hanged in 1718, and now the southern end of the Battery seawall promenade. Its live oaks shade a collection of Civil War cannon and mortars.

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