South of the Border Guide

You will know it’s coming, because for 100-plus miles the billboards have been telling you — “You never sausage a place,” “Keep yelling kids, they’ll stop,” a cartoon mascot named Pedro grinning across the Carolinas. South of the Border opened in 1949 as a beer stand Alan Schafer built just south of the North Carolina line (dry county to the north; the “border” is the NC/SC one), and it metastasized into a 350-acre neon fever dream of fireworks warehouses, motel, mini-golf, a reptile lagoon, and its crown jewel: the Sombrero Tower, a roughly 200-foot observation deck shaped like a sombrero, with a glass elevator up to the brim. The Pedro mascot is a broad south-of-the-border caricature straight out of 1949, and the place knows it’s a relic — you come for the shameless, blinking, only-in-America excess of the thing, not the taste of it. A 2026 fire took out the Burrito Loco building and part of the property’s been listed for sale, so see the sombrero while the sombrero’s still lit.