Charleston International

Founded in 1676 on the Ashley River, Magnolia is the oldest plantation in the South still in the same family, and home to the oldest public gardens in America — opened to visitors in 1870 to save the family from ruin after the Civil War. Unlike the rigid formal gardens of Europe, Magnolia's are romantic and wild: winding paths through ancient live oaks dripping Spanish moss, reflecting ponds, the famous long white bridge, and a riot of azaleas and camellias that peak in spring. The grounds also preserve original cabins of the enslaved people who worked the rice fields, with an honest history program. The old rice impoundments along the Ashley are now a wildlife refuge full of alligators and wading birds.

Charleston is one of the best-preserved historic cities in America — founded in 1670, it was one of the wealthiest cities in colonial America, built on rice, indigo, and the slave trade (nearly half of all enslaved Africans brought to North America came through its harbor). Its peninsula of pastel single houses, church steeples (the "Holy City" nickname comes from its skyline of spires and its early religious tolerance), cobblestone streets, and the grand mansions of the Battery facing the harbor survived largely intact. Fort Sumter, where the Civil War began in April 1861, sits on an island in the harbor. The whole peninsula, ringed by water and historic to its bones, is a National Historic Landmark district.

On the Mount Pleasant side of Charleston Harbor, at the base of the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge, sits a nine-hundred-eighty-foot WWII aircraft carrier moored to the bank. The USS Yorktown (CV-10) was the tenth American carrier in U.S. Navy service, commissioned in April 1943. She fought through the Pacific offensive — Marcus Island, Wake, the Marshalls, Truk, the Marianas Turkey Shoot, Leyte Gulf — earning eleven battle stars and a Presidential Unit Citation. She recovered Apollo 8 in December 1968 and was decommissioned in 1970. In 1975, after a campaign by South Carolina veterans to save her, she was towed up the Cooper River and moored permanently here. Patriots Point Naval & Maritime Museum opened January 3, 1976. Today the site holds nearly a million square feet of exhibit space. Aboard Yorktown: twenty-seven historic aircraft on the flight deck and in the hangar bay including an F4F Wildcat, an F6F Hellcat, an SB2C Helldiver, an A-4 Skyhawk, an F-4 Phantom, an F-14 Tomcat, an A-7 Corsair, and a TBM Avenger. Walk through the chief petty officers' mess, the bridge, the captain's cabin, the engine rooms, and the carrier's sick bay. Alongside Yorktown is the destroyer USS Laffey, "The Ship That Would Not Die" — survived a five-minute kamikaze attack off Okinawa in April 1945 in which she was hit by six kamikaze aircraft and four bombs and stayed afloat. (The third major vessel, the submarine USS Clamagore, was scuttled in 2024 for use as an artificial reef after costs of preservation exceeded funds available.) Also on-site: the Medal of Honor Museum, run by the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, and the three-acre Vietnam Experience exhibit — a recreated firebase with helicopters, simulated patrol routes, and audio overlays.

A 12-mile foot-shaped barrier island at the southern tip of the South Carolina Sea Islands — and a key site in the lesser-known history of African-American self-government during the Civil War. After U.S. Navy ships captured Hilton Head in November 1861 (the largest amphibious assault in U.S. history at that point), thousands of formerly enslaved people from surrounding plantations fled to the Union-occupied island. In 1862, U.S. Brigadier General Ormsby Mitchel laid out Mitchelville on the island's north end — the first self-governed town of formerly enslaved African-Americans in U.S. history, with elected mayor, town council, compulsory school attendance laws (the first in the South), and a population that reached 1,500 by 1865. The Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park preserves the site today. Hilton Head is also the center of Gullah Geechee culture — the creole culture and language descended from West African Mende, Vai, Wolof, and other linguistic groups blended with English, preserved on the isolated Sea Islands from coastal North Carolina to Florida among the descendants of rice-plantation enslaved workers. Congress designated the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor in 2006. Today Hilton Head is also a resort island built around Charles Fraser's 1957 Sea Pines Plantation development — Harbour Town and the iconic 1969 candy-striped Sea Pines Forest Preserve lighthouse.