Louisiana is the most culturally distinctive of the fifty states — a place where French, Spanish, African, Native American, and Caribbean influences tangle together into something no other American state can match. It is also the only state whose legal system is based on Napoleonic civil code rather than English common law, a leftover from its time as a French and then Spanish colony before the 1803 Louisiana Purchase sold the whole lot to Jefferson's United States for less than 3 cents an acre.
For travellers, New Orleans is the centre of gravity. The French Quarter, the Garden District, the Creole cuisine, Mardi Gras, jazz, and the humid, slightly crumbling charm of the whole city make it one of the great urban experiences in the United States. If you have only time for one stop in Louisiana, this is it.
Beyond the city, Cajun country in the southwest — Lafayette, New Iberia, Breaux Bridge — is where French is still spoken on the streets, and where you can spend a weekend in a world of dancehalls, crawfish boils, and swamp tours through the Atchafalaya Basin. The plantation country along the Great River Road between New Orleans and Baton Rouge holds the antebellum mansions: Destrehan, Oak Alley, Laura, Whitney — the last of these now an unflinching museum of slavery rather than a romantic one. Baton Rouge, the state capital, has the tallest state capitol building in the country (Huey Long's art deco monument) and the old Spanish Town quarter.
North Louisiana is different — pine forests, Bible Belt, cotton and oil towns. Shreveport has casinos and a historic downtown; Natchitoches (pronounced NAK-a-tish) is the oldest permanent European settlement in the Louisiana Purchase territory, with a beautifully preserved French-Creole downtown.
Louisiana is hot and wet. May to September is oppressive; October to April is when you want to be there. Hurricane season runs June through November.
