Category: States

Louisiana is unlike any other place in the United States. It is a state that operates according to its own logic, its own calendar, its own culinary laws, and its own deep sense of what makes life worth living. Where other American states were shaped primarily by Anglo-Protestant traditions of industry, temperance, and civic order, Louisiana was formed by a collision of French, Spanish, African, Native American, Caribbean, and later German, Irish, and Italian cultures that produced something genuinely singular: a civilization rooted in pleasure, in music, in food, in Catholic ritual and voodoo mystery, in the languid rhythms of a subtropical landscape that seems to resist the very idea of urgency.

The state sits at the mouth of the Mississippi River, at the southern end of the great continental drainage system that gathers water from thirty-one states and two Canadian provinces and funnels it through Louisiana into the Gulf of Mexico. That geography has shaped everything about the place. It made New Orleans one of the great commercial cities of the nineteenth century. It created the bayou landscape of the Atchafalaya Basin, one of the most biologically rich and visually extraordinary wetland ecosystems in North America. It deposited the fertile soils of the Mississippi alluvial plain that made Louisiana a cotton and sugar kingdom. And it gave the state a perpetual vulnerability to water, expressed most catastrophically in the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 but present in every flood season, every tropical storm, every slowly sinking inch of coastal land disappearing into the Gulf.

Louisiana covers about 52,000 square miles, though that figure shrinks measurably each year as coastal erosion and subsidence consume the state’s southern fringe at an alarming rate. Its population of approximately 4.6 million is concentrated in the New Orleans metropolitan area, the Baton Rouge corridor along the Mississippi, and the Acadiana region of southwestern Louisiana centered on Lafayette. The rest of the state is a mosaic of small cities, river towns, sugar and cotton plantations, pine forests, swamps, prairies, and marshes that sustain a way of life as distinctive and as threatened as the landscape itself.

New Orleans: The City That Care Forgot
No American city has a mythology quite like New Orleans, and the remarkable thing about the mythology is that it is largely true. The city really is more beautiful, more musical, more food-obsessed, more historically layered, and more genuinely strange than any reasonable expectation prepares you for. It is also more complicated, more racially complex, more economically unequal, and more physically fragile than the mythology tends to acknowledge, and understanding both dimensions is essential to understanding the place.

New Orleans was founded by the French in 1718, ceded to Spain in 1762, returned briefly to France, and sold to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Each colonial power left its mark, and the resulting cultural synthesis, overlaid with the massive forced migration of enslaved Africans and the voluntary immigration of free people of color from the Caribbean, produced the most culturally complex city in North America. Walking its streets is a continuous encounter with history expressed in architecture, food, music, language, and ritual in ways that no museum could fully replicate.

The French Quarter
The Vieux Carré, or French Quarter, is the oldest neighborhood in New Orleans and the heart of its tourist life, though it is far more than a tourist attraction. Despite its name, most of its surviving architecture is Spanish Colonial, built after fires destroyed the original French structures in 1788 and 1794. The characteristic buildings, with their stucco facades, wrought iron balconies dripping with ferns and flowers, and interior courtyards hidden behind carriage gates, create one of the most visually distinctive urban environments in America.
Jackson Square, at the river end of the Quarter, is the city’s great public gathering place, dominated by the equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson and the twin towers of the St. Louis Cathedral, the oldest continuously operating Catholic cathedral in the United States. The Pontalba Buildings flanking the square, built in the 1840s, are among the oldest apartment buildings in the country and house shops, restaurants, and residences on their lower and upper floors respectively. The levee behind the square, along the Moon Walk promenade, offers views of the Mississippi that convey the river’s true scale and power in ways that are easy to underestimate from street level.

Bourbon Street, the Quarter’s most famous thoroughfare, delivers exactly what its reputation promises: open-air bars, daiquiri shops, strip clubs, jazz clubs, and a river of tourists at almost any hour of the day or night. It is genuinely lively and occasionally fun in a lowest-common-denominator way, but it represents only a thin slice of what the Quarter and the city have to offer. The blocks away from Bourbon, along Royal Street with its antique shops and art galleries, along Chartres Street with its historic buildings and quieter residential blocks, along Decatur Street at the river’s edge, and through the quieter residential lower Quarter below Esplanade Avenue, are more interesting, more beautiful, and more representative of the Quarter’s genuine character.

The French Market, stretching along Decatur from Jackson Square, has been a commercial hub since the city’s earliest days and still operates as a farmers market, flea market, and food hall. Café Du Monde, at the market’s upper end, has been serving café au lait and beignets, the square pillows of fried dough buried in powdered sugar that are Louisiana’s most iconic food experience, continuously since 1862. The line is often long but moves quickly, and sitting at an outdoor table watching the square’s street performers while powdered sugar drifts onto everything within a ten-foot radius is one of those simple New Orleans pleasures that proves genuinely irreplaceable.

The Historic New Orleans Collection, on Royal Street, is an outstanding museum and research center dedicated to the history and culture of New Orleans and Louisiana, with a permanent gallery telling the city’s story through maps, documents, and artifacts of exceptional quality. The New Orleans Museum of Art, in City Park on the lake side of the Quarter, holds a distinguished collection with particular strengths in French art, photography, and glass, and its Besthoff Sculpture Garden is one of the most beautiful outdoor art spaces in the South.

The Garden District and Uptown
Across Canal Street from the French Quarter lies the American Sector, developed after the Louisiana Purchase by Anglo-American newcomers who preferred to distinguish themselves from the Creole population of the Quarter. The Garden District, roughly bounded by Magazine Street and St. Charles Avenue between Jackson and Louisiana avenues, is one of the great urban residential neighborhoods in America, lined with antebellum and Victorian mansions of extraordinary scale and beauty set behind gardens of live oaks, magnolias, camellias, and subtropical plantings that reach a peak of beauty in late winter and early spring.

The St. Charles Avenue streetcar, the oldest continuously operating streetcar line in the world, runs the length of the avenue from Canal Street through the Garden District and Uptown to the Carrollton neighborhood, and riding it is one of the great simple pleasures of a New Orleans visit. The live oaks lining the neutral ground, their massive limbs forming a canopy over the tracks, the parade of magnificent houses, the Tulane and Loyola university campuses at the avenue’s upper end, and the constant procession of New Orleans life visible from the open windows of the old green cars make this one of the finest urban transit rides in the country.
Magazine Street, parallel to St. Charles one block toward the river, is six miles of antique shops, boutiques, galleries, cafes, and restaurants that together constitute one of the best independent commercial streets in the South. It is a neighborhood shopping street that rewards slow exploration on foot, with discoveries around every corner.

Tremé and the Bywater
The Tremé, immediately behind the French Quarter, is the oldest African American neighborhood in the United States and the birthplace of jazz. The free people of color who gathered in Congo Square, now Louis Armstrong Park, to maintain African musical and cultural traditions in the antebellum period created the foundations of an American musical revolution whose consequences are still unfolding. The neighborhood’s shotgun houses, corner bars, and second-line parade routes are the physical infrastructure of a living musical culture, and the brass bands that still march through its streets on Sunday afternoons for second-line parades are direct descendants of the funeral societies and social clubs that created this tradition more than a century ago.

The Bywater and the Marigny, downriver from the Quarter along the Mississippi, are the city’s most artistically active neighborhoods, populated by musicians, artists, writers, and the young creative class that moved into these neighborhoods in the years after Katrina and helped drive their revival. The area around Frenchmen Street in the Marigny has become the city’s premier live music destination, with a concentration of clubs presenting jazz, blues, funk, and brass band music at a consistently high level that puts Bourbon Street to shame. On weekend nights, the street takes on a festival atmosphere, with musicians spilling onto sidewalks and crowds moving between clubs in a spontaneous celebration that feels like the authentic New Orleans music scene rather than a performance of it.

Food in New Orleans
The food of New Orleans is one of the great urban cuisines of the world, shaped by the same cultural forces that produced its music and architecture. It is a cuisine with deep French and Spanish foundations overlaid with West African techniques and ingredients, enriched by Caribbean influences and the contributions of the city’s successive waves of immigrant communities. The result is a body of dishes with no real parallel anywhere else.

The holy trinity of Creole cooking, bell pepper, onion, and celery, provides the aromatic base for the city’s signature dishes. Gumbo, the deeply flavored stew thickened with okra, filé powder, or a dark roux and containing some combination of seafood, chicken, and andouille sausage, is the city’s central dish and a subject of endless variation and debate. Every cook in New Orleans has an opinion about what constitutes a proper gumbo, and the variations between a seafood gumbo in the French Quarter, a chicken and andouille gumbo in a neighborhood restaurant Uptown, and a gumbo z’herbes served on Holy Thursday in the Tremé are all genuine and all correct within their traditions.

Jambalaya, the rice-based one-pot dish related to Spanish paella and West African jollof rice, comes in Creole and Cajun versions, the former tomato-based and the latter browned and smokier. Red beans and rice, traditionally served on Mondays when the beans could simmer all day while the laundry was done, remains a weekly ritual in homes and restaurants throughout the city. Crawfish étouffée, a rich butter-and-roux-based dish smothering crawfish tails, is one of the most refined expressions of the local larder. Oysters, dredged from the shallow Gulf Coast beds and served raw on the half shell, chargrilled with garlic butter and parmesan, or fried in a po’boy, are a city obsession.

The po’boy, the city’s sandwich tradition, deserves its own paragraph. Served on the crisp, airy French bread baked by a handful of New Orleans bakeries to a formula that cannot be replicated outside the city’s particular climate and water chemistry, a properly dressed po’boy, with fried shrimp or oysters or roast beef debris piled high and dressed with lettuce, tomato, pickles, and mayonnaise, is a masterpiece of simple engineering. Parkway Bakery and Tavern, Domilise’s, and Parasol’s are among the legendary po’boy destinations.

The city’s restaurant scene ranges from the grand old Creole establishments to cutting-edge contemporary restaurants that have put New Orleans among the top dining cities in the country. Commander’s Palace, in the Garden District, is the grande dame of New Orleans fine dining, serving elevated Creole cuisine in an atmosphere of genteel elegance that has produced more James Beard Award-winning chefs than any other restaurant in America. Galatoire’s on Bourbon Street, with its century-old Friday lunch tradition, is a living social institution as much as a restaurant. Dooky Chase’s, in the Tremé, is the legendary restaurant of Leah Chase, the queen of Creole cooking, where civil rights leaders met and ate during the movement years. Antoine’s, founded in 1840, is the oldest family-operated restaurant in the country.

Mardi Gras
No event in American life is quite like Mardi Gras in New Orleans. The celebration, rooted in the Catholic tradition of feasting before the Lenten fast, has been observed in New Orleans since the city’s earliest years and has grown into one of the world’s great folk festivals, a weeks-long carnival of parades, balls, music, costumes, and communal revelry that transforms the entire city.

The official carnival season begins on January 6, Twelfth Night, and builds through a series of parades, krewe balls, and celebrations to the climax of Mardi Gras Day itself, the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday. The parades, organized by the city’s various krewes, mythological social organizations that range from the ancient and aristocratic Rex and Comus to the satirical and irreverent Krewe du Vieux, roll through the streets of Uptown, Mid-City, and the French Quarter on floats decorated to elaborate themes, with masked riders throwing beads, doubloons, cups, and other throws to the crowds lining the route.

The experience of catching Mardi Gras throws, of shouting for beads from the float riders, of standing in the crowd in the cool February air as an enormous papier-mâché float rolls past is one of those experiences that is impossible to fully convey in words. The city during Mardi Gras is simultaneously at its most chaotic and its most itself, and the celebration, while it has grown enormously commercial in parts, retains at its core an authenticity and a communal spirit that sets it apart from similar events elsewhere.
Visitors who want to experience Mardi Gras should book accommodations months in advance, focus their attention on the Uptown parade routes along St. Charles Avenue rather than the French Quarter crowds, seek out the neighborhood celebrations in the Tremé and the Bywater, and allow themselves to be surprised by what they find.

Baton Rouge: The Capital City
Baton Rouge, about eighty miles upriver from New Orleans, is Louisiana’s capital and second-largest city. It sits on the first natural high ground above sea level on the Mississippi, which made it a significant landmark for early explorers and a logical location for a capital. The city has a split personality, simultaneously a serious governmental and university center and a place with a deep, authentic Louisiana culture of its own.

The Louisiana State Capitol, completed in 1932 under Governor Huey Long, is the tallest state capitol in the United States, rising 450 feet above the Mississippi. It is a remarkable Art Deco skyscraper of a building, and the observation deck near its summit offers views of the river and the city that are genuinely spectacular. The Old State Capitol, a Gothic Revival castle on the bluff above the river downtown, is more architecturally interesting and houses an excellent museum of Louisiana political history, which is itself one of the more colorful and dramatic subjects in American political life.

Louisiana State University, on the southern edge of the city, is a major research university with a beautiful campus of Italian Renaissance-style buildings set among live oaks. Tiger Stadium, home of the LSU Tigers football team, holds more than 100,000 people and on Saturday nights in autumn generates an atmosphere of ferocious intensity that is among the most memorable in college football. The LSU Museum of Art holds a significant collection, and the LSU Rural Life Museum, on the university’s Burden Research Plantation, preserves an outstanding collection of vernacular buildings and artifacts relating to the lives of ordinary Louisianans before industrialization.

The Shaw Center for the Arts downtown and the Manship Theatre anchor Baton Rouge’s performing arts scene. The USS Kidd Veterans Museum, where a World War II Fletcher-class destroyer is permanently moored on the riverfront, is a well-maintained and informative attraction.
The food scene in Baton Rouge is considerably better than its reputation among New Orleans-focused visitors suggests. Cane’s Chicken Fingers, now a national chain, was founded here. Louie’s Café, open since 1941, is a beloved all-night diner. A strong Cajun and Creole restaurant tradition is maintained in dozens of independent establishments throughout the city, and the city’s Vietnamese community, one of the largest in the South, has produced a remarkable concentration of outstanding Vietnamese restaurants.

Acadiana: The Heart of Cajun Country
The southwestern quadrant of Louisiana, centered on Lafayette and stretching south to the Gulf marshes and west to the Texas border, is Acadiana, the homeland of the Cajun people and the heartland of one of the most vibrant and resilient folk cultures in North America.
The Cajuns are the descendants of the Acadians, French colonists expelled from Nova Scotia by the British in 1755 in the event known as Le Grand Dérangement, the Great Upheaval. After years of exile and wandering, thousands of Acadians made their way to Louisiana, then a French and Spanish colony, where they settled in the bayou country and adapted their language, their cuisine, and their culture to the subtropical environment. What emerged from that adaptation is Cajun culture, a living tradition of music, food, language, and community celebration that continues to define life in southwestern Louisiana.

Lafayette, the capital of Acadiana, is a mid-sized city of about 130,000 with a cultural vitality far exceeding its size. The Vermilionville Living History Museum and Folklife Park, on the banks of the Vermilion River, recreates a Cajun and Creole village of the 1765 to 1890 period with costumed interpreters, restored buildings, and demonstrations of traditional crafts and cooking. The Acadian Cultural Center, part of Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve, tells the story of the Acadian exile and settlement in Louisiana through excellent exhibits and a moving film. The Lafayette Museum and the Alexandre Mouton House offer additional windows into local history.

The food of Acadiana is Cajun cooking at its source and best. The distinction between Cajun and Creole cooking is subtle but real: Creole cooking is the urban cuisine of New Orleans, more refined and cosmopolitan, while Cajun cooking is the rural cooking of the prairie and the bayou, simpler, spicier, more focused on smoked meats and the products of the local environment. Boudin, the Cajun sausage made from pork, rice, and spices stuffed into a natural casing, is the region’s essential food, available at gas stations, grocery stores, and dedicated boudin shops throughout Acadiana. The quality and variety of boudin in this region, with variations including boudin blanc, boudin rouge made with blood, and smoked boudin, is a subject of genuine connoisseurship among locals.

Cracklins, fried pork skin cooked in the Cajun style with more meat attached than standard pork rinds, are another essential regional product, best consumed fresh from a cast iron pot at a rural meat market. Crawfish, in season from roughly December through June, appear in étouffée, in bisque, boiled in spiced water at crawfish boils that are the central social event of spring in Acadiana, and in dozens of other preparations. Alligator, both wild-caught and farm-raised, is eaten fried, stewed, and smoked throughout the region.

The music of Acadiana is among the great living folk music traditions in the world. Cajun music, played on accordion, fiddle, and guitar in a style that combines French folk melodies with the rhythms of the blues and country music, and its African American counterpart zydeco, which adds rhythm and blues, funk, and soul influences to the Cajun instrumental vocabulary, are both living traditions performed every weekend at dance halls, festivals, and restaurants throughout the region. Randol’s in Lafayette, Fred’s Lounge in Mamou, and Slim’s Y-Ki-Ki in Opelousas are among the legendary venues where these traditions are maintained in their most authentic form.

The Festival International de Louisiane, held in Lafayette each April, is the largest free francophone music festival in the world, drawing artists from France, Africa, the Caribbean, and Quebec alongside Louisiana’s own musicians for a weekend of outdoor concerts that celebrate the global reach of French-language culture. The Festivals Acadiens et Créoles, also in Lafayette, celebrates Cajun and Creole music, food, and crafts each October. Breaux Bridge, just east of Lafayette, hosts the Crawfish Festival each May, celebrating the crustacean that is the region’s totem animal with music, cooking competitions, and competitive crawfish eating.

The bayou country south of Lafayette, traversed by Louisiana Highway 182 along Bayou Teche and the more remote routes through the Atchafalaya Basin, is some of the most atmospheric landscape in the United States. Spanish moss hanging from ancient live oaks over dark bayou water, cypress trees rising from swamps, egrets and roseate spoonbills standing in the shallows, alligators floating like logs near the bank, and the occasional old Creole cottage or plantation house glimpsed through the vegetation create a landscape that feels genuinely primordial and unlike anything north of the tropics.

The Atchafalaya Basin, the largest river swamp in North America, covering nearly a million acres between the levees of the Atchafalaya River in south-central Louisiana, is one of the great natural wonders of the continent. A swamp tour, available from dozens of operators in the towns of Henderson, Breaux Bridge, and Pierre Part, is one of the most rewarding outdoor experiences in Louisiana. The tours, typically conducted in flat-bottomed aluminum boats, move through cypress-tupelo swamp forests of extraordinary beauty, with knowledgeable guides pointing out alligators, herons, egrets, anhinga, wood ducks, river otters, and the remarkable variety of plant life that thrives in this aquatic forest. The experience of floating through a cathedral of cypress trees draped in moss, with alligators resting on logs a few feet away, is one that stays with visitors for the rest of their lives.

Plantation Country and the River Road
Between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, the great plantations of the antebellum sugar country line both banks of the Mississippi on what is known as the River Road. This stretch of river was the wealthiest agricultural region in North America before the Civil War, producing the vast majority of America’s sugar on the labor of tens of thousands of enslaved people. The plantation houses that survive, and there are many, are among the most architecturally distinguished buildings in the South.

Oak Alley Plantation, near Vacherie on the west bank, is the most famous and most photographed, its Greek Revival mansion approached through a quarter-mile alley of ancient live oaks whose canopy forms a perfect tunnel of filtered green light. The plantation offers tours of the house and grounds, and a recent expansion of its interpretation to include the experience of the enslaved people who lived and worked there has added significant depth and honesty to what was previously a somewhat sanitized presentation. Whitney Plantation, nearby, is the only plantation museum in Louisiana dedicated primarily to the history of slavery rather than the architecture of the planter class. Its memorial to the enslaved people who lived and died on the plantation, including a field of sculpted children’s faces representing the youngest victims, is deeply affecting.

Laura Plantation, also on the west bank, offers a different kind of tour, focused on the lives of the Creole planter family who owned it and distinguished by the quality of the historical scholarship behind its interpretation. The original Br’er Rabbit stories, collected by folklorist Joel Chandler Harris and later adapted by Disney, are said to have originated with the West African storytelling traditions maintained by enslaved people on the Laura plantation.

Houmas House, on the east bank near Darrow, is a stunning Greek Revival mansion with exceptional gardens and a restaurant that serves ambitious Cajun-Creole cuisine. Nottoway Plantation in White Castle, the largest antebellum plantation house in the South, offers overnight accommodations in its 53,000-square-foot Italianate and Greek Revival mansion, an experience that is architecturally extraordinary and historically complicated in equal measure.

Natchitoches and Central Louisiana
Natchitoches, pronounced NACK-uh-tish by locals, is the oldest permanent European settlement in the Louisiana Purchase territory, founded by French colonists in 1714, four years before New Orleans. It sits on the banks of the Cane River in north-central Louisiana, a small city of about 18,000 that preserves a remarkable historic district along the waterfront, with Creole cottage architecture, brick storefronts, and a general atmosphere of provincial French elegance that is genuinely distinctive.

The Natchitoches National Historic Landmark District, covering thirty-three blocks along the Cane River, contains more than 100 historic structures and is one of the finest small-town historic districts in the South. The Cane River National Heritage Area, extending south of the city along the old river channel that was cut off from the Red River in the early twentieth century, encompasses a string of plantation properties, some of which are owned and operated by the descendants of free people of color who built them, a historical peculiarity of the Cane River Creole community that is unique in American history.

Natchitoches is famous as the setting of the play and film Steel Magnolias, and the annual Christmas Festival of Lights, held on the first weekend of December, draws enormous crowds for a spectacular display of holiday lights along the Cane River, fireworks, and the general festivity of a small Louisiana city doing what Louisiana cities do best.
The Poverty Point World Heritage Site, in the northeastern corner of the state near the town of Epps, preserves the remains of one of the most remarkable prehistoric monuments in North America. Constructed between 1700 and 1100 BCE by a pre-agricultural society whose identity and organization remain incompletely understood, the site consists of a series of enormous concentric earthen ridges and mounds arranged in a semicircle more than three-quarters of a mile in diameter. The engineering required to move the millions of cubic yards of earth that went into its construction, without draft animals or wheeled vehicles, implies a level of social organization and deliberate planning that continues to astonish archaeologists. The visitor center presents the site’s history clearly and the viewing tower provides a perspective on the earthworks that is otherwise impossible to obtain.

Shreveport and the Ark-La-Tex
Shreveport, in the extreme northwest corner of Louisiana near the Texas and Arkansas borders, is the state’s third-largest city and the cultural center of a region known as the Ark-La-Tex. It has a different character from the rest of Louisiana, more Southern than Cajun, more Baptist than Catholic, more country than jazz. The Louisiana Boardwalk, a large entertainment and retail complex on the Red River waterfront, and a cluster of casino resorts along the river are the main commercial attractions.

The Shreveport Municipal Auditorium is one of the most historically significant buildings in American music history. It was the home of the Louisiana Hayride from 1948 to 1960, the live country music radio program broadcast on KWKH that launched the careers of Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and dozens of other performers who went on to define American popular music. The auditorium is beautifully restored and offers tours and events. The R.S. Barnwell Memorial Garden and Art Center, the Meadows Museum of Art, and the Louisiana State Exhibit Museum round out the city’s cultural offerings.

The Caddo Lake area along the Texas border, while largely in Texas, extends into northwestern Louisiana and offers beautiful cypress swamp scenery and excellent fishing. The Kisatchie National Forest, the only national forest in Louisiana, covers nearly 600,000 acres in the central part of the state and provides excellent opportunities for hiking, camping, and paddling through pine forests and along clear-water bayous that feel very different from the swamp landscapes of the south.

The Gulf Coast and Sportsman’s Paradise
Louisiana’s Gulf Coast is one of the most productive and biologically rich marine environments in the world, and the state’s coastal culture of fishing, hunting, trapping, and shrimping is one of its most distinctive and deeply rooted traditions. The coastal communities, many of them built on islands and cheniers, ridges of ancient shells and sediment rising a few feet above the surrounding marsh, have a self-sufficient, end-of-the-road character that reflects generations of adaptation to one of the most challenging and beautiful environments in North America.
Grand Isle, the only inhabited barrier island on the Louisiana Gulf Coast that is accessible by road, is the state’s premier beach destination, a title that reflects more the scarcity of alternatives than the quality of the beach by comparison with Florida or Alabama standards. What Grand Isle lacks in white sand it makes up for in fishing, birding, and the atmospheric charm of a genuine working fishing village. The island sits directly in the path of spring bird migration, and during May, when waves of exhausted neotropical migrants making landfall after crossing the Gulf of Mexico descend on the island’s trees and shrubs, it is one of the finest birding spectacles in North America.

The Creole Nature Trail, a designated National Scenic Byway looping through the coastal marshes of southwestern Louisiana between Lake Charles and Cameron, offers some of the most accessible and rewarding wildlife watching in the state. American alligators are visible from the road in extraordinary numbers, and the marshes support large concentrations of herons, egrets, roseate spoonbills, and in winter, spectacular concentrations of snow geese and other waterfowl that can number in the hundreds of thousands.
Lake Charles, the largest city in southwestern Louisiana, is a petrochemical and gaming center with a lively Mardi Gras celebration of its own, distinctive Cajun and Creole food traditions, and proximity to some of the best freshwater fishing in the state on the Calcasieu Lake system. The Imperial Calcasieu Museum has a solid collection of local history and art.

Food and Drink
Louisiana food deserves extended treatment because it is, without exaggeration, one of the great regional cuisines of the world. The combination of cultural influences, the extraordinary richness of the local larder, and the genuine passion for eating that is part of the state’s cultural DNA have produced a food culture of astonishing depth and variety.
The seafood available in Louisiana is among the finest in America. Gulf oysters, smaller and brinier than their Pacific counterparts, are consumed in enormous quantities raw, fried, chargrilled, baked, and in dishes from oysters Rockefeller, invented at Antoine’s in New Orleans in 1899, to oyster po’boys to oyster dressing. Gulf shrimp, both wild-caught brown and white varieties, are a staple of both restaurant and home cooking throughout the state. Speckled trout, redfish, flounder, drum, and catfish are the primary finfish of the Louisiana table. Blue crabs from the coastal marshes are boiled in spiced water in the same tradition as Maryland but with Louisiana’s distinctly hotter spice profile.

Crawfish, the small freshwater crustaceans found in Louisiana’s bayous, rice fields, and farm ponds, occupy a place in Louisiana’s food culture that is difficult to overstate. The crawfish season, running roughly from December through June with the peak in March and April, is marked by crawfish boils, communal outdoor feasts at which crawfish are boiled in large pots with potatoes, corn, mushrooms, and sausage in heavily spiced water, poured out on newspaper-covered tables, and eaten by hand by groups of family and friends. The crawfish boil is one of the great communal eating traditions in American life, and participating in one, even as a spectator, is one of the most authentic Louisiana experiences available to visitors.
The liquor culture of Louisiana is as distinctive as its food culture. The Sazerac, made with rye whiskey, Peychaud’s bitters, absinthe, and sugar, is the official cocktail of New Orleans and one of the oldest cocktails in America. The Ramos Gin Fizz, the Hurricane, the Milk Punch, and the French 75 are other cocktails with deep New Orleans roots. The city’s distinctive culture of open container drinking, which allows alcohol to be carried in plastic cups on public streets throughout the French Quarter and other areas, contributes to the festive, continuous-party atmosphere that is central to the New Orleans experience.

Louisiana’s craft spirits industry has grown significantly, with Celebration Distillation’s Old New Orleans Rum, Roulaison Distilling, and a growing number of local producers joining the established traditions of Sazerac and other historic brands. The state’s craft brewery scene, while smaller than those of neighboring states, has produced notable producers including Abita Brewing, founded in 1986 in Abita Springs north of New Orleans, whose amber ale has been a fixture of Louisiana tables for decades, and NOLA Brewing, which has earned a strong regional following.

Music
Louisiana’s contribution to American music is so enormous that it is almost impossible to fully catalog. Jazz, invented in New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century from the collision of European harmonic tradition, West African rhythm, blues, and Caribbean music, is the most globally influential American musical form. Rhythm and blues, which grew from the New Orleans tradition in the 1940s and 1950s and was central to the development of rock and roll, was shaped by New Orleans musicians and producers including Fats Domino, Professor Longhair, Allen Toussaint, and dozens of others. Cajun music and zydeco, the living folk traditions of Acadiana, are world-recognized musical forms with deep roots and continued vitality. Country music was shaped by the Louisiana Hayride and its alumni. Swamp pop, the distinctively Louisiana hybrid of rhythm and blues and country that emerged in the late 1950s, added another strand to the state’s musical tapestry.

Music in Louisiana is not primarily a spectator sport. It is a participatory culture, expressed in second-line parades, in Mardi Gras Indian rehearsals, in dance hall Saturday nights, in jazz funerals where grief and celebration are held simultaneously, in the spontaneous brass band concerts that erupt in the French Quarter on weekend afternoons. Visitors who want to experience Louisiana music at its most authentic should seek out the second-line parades that roll through New Orleans neighborhoods every Sunday from fall through spring, the dance halls of Acadiana on weekends, and the smaller, less famous music venues of New Orleans where local musicians play for local audiences rather than tourist crowds.
The Jazz and Heritage Festival, held in New Orleans over two weekends at the end of April and beginning of May, is one of the world’s great music festivals, presenting not only jazz but the full spectrum of Louisiana music alongside the food of Louisiana’s various regional traditions on the infield of the Fair Grounds Race Course. The festival’s local food offerings alone, crawfish monica, cochon de lait, mango freeze, soft-shell crab, and dozens of other regional specialties, constitute a world-class culinary event in their own right.

Practical Travel Information
Louisiana is served by Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, one of the major hub airports of the South with extensive nonstop service to domestic and international destinations, and by smaller regional airports in Baton Rouge, Lafayette, Shreveport, and Lake Charles. A car is essential for exploring beyond New Orleans, though within New Orleans itself the streetcar system, the Uber and rideshare network, and the walkability of the French Quarter and adjacent neighborhoods make car-free travel quite practical.
The climate is subtropical throughout the state, with long, hot, extremely humid summers and mild winters that rarely bring significant cold. Spring and fall are the most comfortable seasons, with pleasant temperatures and lower humidity. Hurricane season runs from June through November, and the Gulf Coast is genuinely vulnerable to tropical weather systems. The flooding that devastated New Orleans in Hurricane Katrina in 2005 led to significant improvements in the city’s flood protection infrastructure, but coastal vulnerability remains a reality that visitors in hurricane season should take seriously.

Accommodations in New Orleans range from grand historic hotels including the Roosevelt, the Monteleone, and the Windsor Court to outstanding boutique properties in the French Quarter and Garden District, to vacation rental shotgun houses in the Marigny and Bywater. Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest, and the Sugar Bowl bring peak demand and peak prices, and booking well in advance is essential for those periods.

Festivals and Events
Louisiana’s festival calendar is one of the richest in the country. Beyond Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest, the French Quarter Festival in April is a massive free music festival presenting local musicians on stages throughout the Quarter. The Essence Festival, held over the Fourth of July weekend in the Superdome, is the largest African American cultural event in the country. Satchmo Summer Fest celebrates Louis Armstrong’s legacy each August. The Oak Street Po’Boy Festival each November celebrates the state’s signature sandwich. Numerous crawfish, shrimp, and seafood festivals are held throughout the coastal and Acadiana regions from spring through fall.

Final Thoughts
Louisiana resists easy summary because it is, in ways both literal and metaphorical, always shifting and always sinking. The land itself is in constant motion, built up by the Mississippi and eaten away by the Gulf, and the culture that has grown from that unstable ground is equally dynamic, equally resistant to fixity. New Orleans is not a museum of itself, though it sometimes looks like one. Acadiana is not a theme park of Cajun culture, though it sometimes markets itself as one. Louisiana is a living place with living problems, including coastal erosion so severe that the state is losing a football field of land to the Gulf every hour, poverty rates that are among the highest in the nation, and the continuing social and physical recovery from Katrina that is still incomplete nearly two decades later.

None of that diminishes the experience of being there. In fact it deepens it, because Louisiana’s pleasures are not the pleasures of a sanitized tourist destination but the pleasures of a real place where real people have found, against considerable odds, ways to eat beautifully, to make extraordinary music, to celebrate life with a fervor that puts most of the country to shame. To travel in Louisiana is to be reminded of what it looks like when a culture decides that the quality of daily life matters more than productivity, that a good meal and good music are not luxuries but necessities, and that the proper response to a landscape of surpassing beauty and fragility is not to exploit it or to sentimentalize it but to love it while it is there.