Savannah Versus Charleston: Americans Keep Getting Them Confused. Here’s Why They’re Nothing Alike

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Savannah, Georgia and Charleston, South Carolina are the two most visited cities in the American South, both anchored by historic architecture, Spanish moss, and a coastal Southern atmosphere that makes them feel superficially similar in photographs. They are not similar. Travelers who have spent time in both describe two distinct cities with different social characters, different built environments, different food cultures, and a decades-long low-grade rivalry that both cities maintain with polite intensity.

Savannah vs. Charleston — What Actually Differs

Charleston is a peninsula city — bounded by the Ashley and Cooper rivers — with a density and verticality that Savannah’s grid of squares doesn’t have. Charleston’s antebellum wealth was built on rice and indigo, then cotton, and the city built with that wealth in ways that are more formally architectural than Savannah’s Federal-period character. The Battery, Rainbow Row, and the French Quarter of Charleston have a physical scale and preservation quality that makes the city feel like a functioning museum in ways Savannah’s more lived-in downtown doesn’t quite replicate.

The Food Difference

Both cities have excellent food. The styles differ. Charleston’s food culture is defined by Lowcountry cuisine — shrimp and grits, she-crab soup, oyster roasts, and the specific coastal Carolina cooking tradition that has produced more James Beard Award winners per capita than almost any city in the South. Savannah’s food is Gulf South Creole-influenced, with a different flavor palette and a restaurant culture that has been developing under the shadow of Savannah College of Art and Design’s creative community for 30 years.

How to Choose

• Go to Charleston for: more formal architecture, Lowcountry food at its finest, the Battery and harbor, the Civil War history at Fort Sumter
• Go to Savannah for: the squares and walkable public spaces, Forsyth Park, the Bonaventure Cemetery, the River Arts District studios, the SCAD museum
• Go to both: they’re 107 miles apart on I-95, and a coastal drive through South Carolina’s Low Country connects them through some of the most ecologically dramatic landscape on the East Coast

The Savannah-Charleston debate is ultimately unresolvable because it’s a matter of which kind of Southern city character you respond to. Savannah is warmer and more casual; Charleston is more formal and more curated. Both are extraordinary. The right answer for most travelers is both, in sequence, on a coastal drive that takes US-17 rather than I-95 and shows you the ACE Basin, the sea islands, and the tidal marshes that connect the two cities along one of the least developed stretches of the East Coast.