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Charleston was founded in 1670 on a narrow peninsula between the Ashley and Cooper rivers, making it one of the oldest cities in British North America. It grew wealthy through the export of indigo, rice, and cotton, wealth built on the forced labor of enslaved Africans who arrived through Gadsden's Wharf, the largest slave-trading site in North America. The tension between that brutal history and the city's celebrated beauty is something every thoughtful visitor navigates. The pastel antebellum mansions along Rainbow Row on East Bay Street, built between 1740 and 1820, are genuinely lovely and genuinely complicated.

The historic French Quarter and South of Broad neighborhoods reward slow, on-foot exploration.

St. Philip's Church on Church Street, with its Georgian steeple visible from much of the peninsula, dates to 1836 on a site of worship going back to 1681. Fort Sumter, where Confederate forces fired on the Union garrison in April 1861 to begin the Civil War, sits in the harbor and is accessible by ferry. The Charleston City Market, operating continuously since the 1790s, is the heart of daily commerce and the place to find sweetgrass baskets woven by Gullah artisans.