Start from 31 curated places around Beaufort, SC, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
Old Bull Tavern
The gastropub that locals stake their reputation on when visitors ask for a real recommendation — a high-ceilinged brick room on West Street that serves house-made pastas, wood-roasted meats, and an unusually deep craft beer and cocktail list. The market-driven menu changes with what's good locally, and the kitchen actually executes it. Ranked number one in Beaufort for a reason.
Breakwater Restaurant & Bar
Upscale Lowcountry cooking in a handsome downtown room, with the kind of service and sourcing more common in Charleston than a town this size. The she-crab soup is a benchmark against which everything else in Beaufort gets measured. Order the Mixed Fried Platter if you want to understand what properly fried local shrimp and grouper tastes like — nothing soggy, nothing over-seasoned.
Trails & outdoors
Spanish Moss Trail
The 10-mile paved rail trail that cuts through northern Beaufort County from Port Royal to Azalea Drive — completely flat, wide enough for cyclists and strollers side by side, and shaded by a continuous canopy of live oaks. Outside Magazine named it one of the top urban walking trails in the country. The Port Royal end connects to the Sands Beach area for a natural extension to the water.
Hunting Island Loop
The 8.6-mile loop through Hunting Island State Park covers maritime forest, salt marsh boardwalks, and stretches of undeveloped Atlantic beach in a single circuit — the best single trail in the Beaufort region. The diversity of terrain within one trail is remarkable: dense palm-studded forest gives way to open beach and then boardwalked marsh with no abrupt transitions.
Things to do
Sea Island Carriage Company
The best 55-minute tour of Beaufort's history available — a narrated horse-drawn carriage ride that covers antebellum architecture, Gullah culture, Robert Smalls, movie locations (The Big Chill was filmed here), and the Civil War in a format that covers ground faster than a walking tour and slower than driving. The guides know the material cold and take questions seriously.
USCB Center for the Arts
The Lowcountry's main performing arts venue — a 300-seat theater on Carteret Street that hosts the Beaufort International Film Festival, the Beaufort Orchestra, regional theater, and touring music acts. The room is the right size: every seat has clear sightlines and the acoustic is genuinely good. Check the calendar before arrival because the program rotates constantly.
Landmarks & sights
Henry C. Chambers Waterfront Park
The living room of downtown Beaufort — a swept waterfront promenade along the Beaufort River lined with live oaks, old-fashioned swings overlooking the water, and a grassy amphitheater that fills up for festivals. Dolphins cruise by regularly at dawn, and it's the launchpad for everything worthwhile on Bay Street.
The Point Historic District
The oldest residential tip of Beaufort's downtown peninsula, where antebellum mansions draped in Spanish moss face the river on streets barely wide enough for a carriage. The Thomas Hepworth House dates to 1717; The Big Chill house is here too. No tour required — just walk Craven Street toward the water and let the architecture do the talking.