Things to Do in New Orleans: French Quarter, Jazz and Swamps

New Orleans sits on a bend of the Mississippi River in southeast Louisiana, 29.98°N, 90.08°W, founded in 1718, with 383,997 people inside limits covering 907 km², much of it open water. Of its 12 districts, the French Quarter, the Garden District, Tremé and Faubourg Marigny carry nearly all visitor traffic. The New Orleans catalogue we track lists 674 bookable experiences at a median of €48, from €15.39 to €167.54, behind 123,643 reviews across the 50 products we sample.

Its shape is unlike most city catalogues. There is no cathedral queue to buy past: 1 of the 50 products carries a skip-the-line flag, and it is an aquarium ticket. What sells is a mood and a boat — 11 products are ghost, voodoo or haunted tours (29.4% of reviews) and 15 are swamp, bayou or airboat trips (23.9%), over half of everything booked in this city's name.

What should you book first in New Orleans?

Book by the clock, not by the queue. Only 1 of the 50 products carries a skip-the-line flag and 0 are flagged as likely to sell out, so nothing here is rationed; what is scarce is daylight. Swamp trips with transport run 4 to 5 hours, River Road plantation days 5.4 to 5.5, and combined swamp-and-plantation days 7.75 to 8, while everything else in the top ten is short — 0.9, 1.75, 1.75, 2, 2, 3 and 3 hours. Since 100% of the catalogue cancels free of charge, holding dates early costs nothing across the city's bookable experiences.

The French Quarter: a Spanish city with a French name

The Vieux Carré is the original grid of 1718, thirteen blocks by six between the river, Canal Street, Rampart Street and Esplanade Avenue, holding Jackson Square and the St. Louis Cathedral. Almost nothing there is French: fires in 1788 and 1794 destroyed the timber city under Spanish rule, and it was rebuilt to Spanish colonial codes — brick, stucco, courtyards and the iron galleries everyone photographs as French. The catalogue treats the Quarter as walking ground, not a ticket; its strongest product here is a food walk at €72.12 for 3 hours, rated 4.83 across 6,641 reviews.

Live jazz: Frenchmen Street, Congo Square and the Jazz Museum

Live music divides by street. Bourbon Street runs on daiquiris, cover bands and volume; Frenchmen Street, three blocks of Faubourg Marigny past the Quarter, holds the working jazz, funk and brass rooms — The Spotted Cat, d.b.a., Snug Harbor — and most charge little or nothing at the door. Preservation Hall, on St. Peter Street since 1961, is the acoustic room: no amplification, no bar, short sets.

Congo Square, inside Louis Armstrong Park in Tremé, is the origin site — ground where enslaved Africans were permitted to gather on Sundays under colonial law and kept West and Central African drumming and dance alive. The New Orleans Jazz Museum, run by the Louisiana State Museum in the Old U.S. Mint of 1835, holds Louis Armstrong's first cornet, per nolajazzmuseum.org. The packaged version rates badly: the five lowest-rated products in the catalogue are all river cruises, 4.13 to 4.26, and the seven cruise products hold 19,660 reviews at a weighted 4.23, the worst of any category here.

The National WWII Museum in the Warehouse District

The National WWII Museum opened on 6 June 2000 as the National D-Day Museum, built around the Higgins boat — the landing craft designed and made in New Orleans by Andrew Higgins and used at Normandy. Congress later designated it the country's official National WWII Museum, and the campus now spans several pavilions. It is the only museum admission among the catalogue's twenty most-booked products: €34.18, rated 4.84 across 2,352 reviews, 29.3% below the €48 median. Allow far longer than the two hours the ticket nominally covers; pavilions at nationalww2museum.org.

Swamp tours, alligators and the Barataria Preserve

The largest category sold under this city's name is not in the city. 15 of the 50 products are swamp, bayou or airboat trips holding 29,587 reviews — 23.9% of the total, from €15.39, the cheapest product in the catalogue, to €140.71. The slow covered boat is quiet enough for wildlife at €15.39 to €30.78 without transport; the airboat, a flat-bottomed hull pushed by an aircraft propeller so it can run over inches of water, is faster, louder and dearer at €51.89 to €101.14. The best-reviewed is a bayou boat with transport at €66.42 for 5 hours, rated 4.91 across 6,851 reviews.

The American alligator left the United States endangered species list in 1987 and is managed as a protected species. Alligators are ectotherms: below roughly 21°C they stop feeding and largely stop moving, so winter trips see far fewer. The free alternative is the Barataria Preserve at Marrero, a unit of Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve, with boardwalk trails through the same cypress-tupelo swamp and no admission fee. Trails at nps.gov/jela.

New Orleans is the rare city whose biggest bookable category lies outside it and whose biggest event cannot be booked at all. Between the swamp and the street parade, the catalogue is selling the things in between.

Iracema Melo, on reading the New Orleans catalogue

The St. Charles streetcar and the Garden District

The St. Charles Avenue line began in 1835 as the New Orleans & Carrollton Rail Road and is the oldest continuously operating street railway in the world, a National Historic Landmark worked by dark-green Perley A. Thomas cars from the 1920s. It leaves Canal Street for Carrollton, 45 to 50 minutes one way at a walking-pace rumble that is the ride itself, not a shortcut. The Garden District starts fifteen minutes up the line, carved from the Livaudais plantation from 1832 by Anglo-American newcomers who settled upriver of the Creole city and were only annexed in 1852. One house per large lot gives it its name and its Greek Revival frontages.

Cemeteries: above-ground tombs and the year-and-a-day rule

The cemeteries of New Orleans are consecrated, working burial grounds, most of them Catholic and administered by the Archdiocese of New Orleans. Families still bury their dead in them, and the ghost-tour framing sits badly on ground where someone's grandmother was interred last year.

The tombs stand above ground because that is how French and Spanish colonists buried people, following Mediterranean practice — the story that coffins float out of the soil is a contributing detail at most, not the reason. What matters is reuse. A family tomb is a brick oven in the Louisiana climate; by the custom the law recognises, it may not be reopened until a year and a day after the last burial, when the earlier remains go into the caveau, the vault beneath, and the space is used again. One tomb holds generations, which is why the inscriptions run to a dozen names.

St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, opened in 1789, is the oldest still standing, and the catalogue's cheapest headline product is its authorised walking tour: €21.99 for 55 minutes, rated 4.63 across 4,603 reviews, 54.5% below the €48 median. That product exists precisely because access is restricted — the Archdiocese admits visitors accompanied by an authorised guide, or descendants of those buried there. Rules differ by cemetery and have changed more than once, so verify the current position before you go.

Voodoo in New Orleans is a religion, not a ghost tour

Louisiana Voodoo is a religion with West and Central African roots — Fon, Yoruba and Kongo — carried to the colony by enslaved people, reinforced after 1791 by refugees from the Haitian Revolution, and syncretised with Catholicism under conditions where open African practice was punished. It has practitioners in the city today, with temples and community obligations that have nothing to do with visitors.

Marie Laveau (c. 1801-1881), a free woman of color, hairdresser, practising Catholic and the most influential Voodoo figure in the city's history, is presumed to lie in the Glapion family tomb in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. Marking that tomb with chalk crosses is vandalism of a listed monument and a modern invention, not an inherited rite. Leave it unmarked.

The catalogue's framing is worth naming plainly. 11 of the 50 products are ghost, voodoo or haunted tours holding 36,298 reviews — 29.4% of the total, and the city's most-booked experience is one of them, at €32.53 for 1.75 hours, rated 4.55 across 13,647 reviews. Their titles routinely file a living religion between a ghost and a vampire. A tour can entertain and still be a poor place to learn what Voodoo is.

River Road plantations: sites of enslavement

River Road follows the Mississippi upriver through St. Charles, St. John the Baptist and St. James parishes. The houses along it were the residences of sugar planters, and the estates around them were forced-labour camps: their wealth was produced by enslaved people, sugar being among the deadliest work in North American slavery. That is what a plantation visit is a visit to, and sites handle it very differently.

Whitney Plantation at Wallace opened in 2014 as the first museum in the United States built specifically around slavery, interpreting the site from the perspective of the people enslaved there, with memorials naming them and their testimony at the centre of the visit. Oak Alley at Vacherie is known for its corridor of 28 live oaks and runs a slavery exhibit in reconstructed quarters alongside the house tour. Destrehan, dating to 1787, was connected to the 1811 German Coast uprising, the largest revolt by enslaved people in United States history.

The booking data shows which framing sells. 7 plantation products hold 8,017 reviews — 6.5% of the total, and by site Oak Alley's three carry 6,067 reviews against Whitney's 1,823 — 3.3 to 1, while the only Destrehan product is sold as a haunted night tour at €60.68. A city tour built explicitly on enslavement and its aftermath rates 4.93, the highest of any city tour here, on just 525 reviews, priced at exactly the €48 median. Demand points at the oak allée; the history is at the other end of it.

Creole

In Louisiana, originally people born in the colony rather than in Europe or Africa. Creole cooking is the city's kitchen: tomato and butter, European technique crossed with African and Caribbean cooking.

Cajun

Descendants of the Acadians expelled from present-day Nova Scotia between 1755 and 1764, who settled rural southwest Louisiana. Cajun cooking is country cooking: dark roux, one pot, no tomato.

Second line

The crowd that follows the "main line" of a brass band and its club through the street, dancing. It descends from jazz funerals and the Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, which still parade on Sundays.

Beignet

A square of fried dough with no hole, buried in powdered sugar; the official state doughnut of Louisiana since 1986.

Po'boy

A sandwich on New Orleans French bread, named in the 1929 streetcar strike, when the Martin brothers fed striking conductors — "here comes another poor boy".

Creole and Cajun cooking: gumbo, beignets and the po'boy

The two Louisiana cuisines are not synonyms. Creole is the city cuisine, built in New Orleans kitchens with European technique, African and Caribbean influence and tomato in the pot; Cajun is the rural cuisine of the Acadian parishes west of here, built on a dark roux and one pot. Both give you gumbo, and the two gumbos are different dishes. Around them sit jambalaya, crawfish étouffée, red beans and rice on Monday, the muffuletta, the po'boy and the beignet. Food is the catalogue's best-rated category: 5 products holding 13,138 reviews at a weighted 4.86, against 4.79 for swamp trips, 4.63 for ghost tours and 4.23 for cruises.

Mardi Gras: the thing the catalogue cannot sell you

Mardi Gras is a day, not a season. Carnival opens on 6 January, Twelfth Night, and closes on Mardi Gras itself, the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday — 9 February 2027, then 29 February 2028, moving each year with Easter. The parades are run by krewes, private clubs that build the floats and throw beads and hand-decorated objects to the crowd. They roll on public streets, and watching costs nothing. That is why 0 of the 50 products we sample is a Mardi Gras product: the largest event this city stages is structurally unsellable, though it does take the accommodation market apart for a fortnight.

New Orleans experiences compared: price, time, rating

Prices, durations and ratings below are the figures we track today for the ten most-reviewed products in the full New Orleans experience catalogue.

Getting around New Orleans: streetcars, buses and the ferry

The New Orleans Regional Transit Authority runs the buses and four streetcar lines — St. Charles, Canal, Riverfront and Rampart–St. Claude — on a published fare of $1.25 a ride, with a one-day Jazzy Pass at $3 and a three-day at $9; check the current table at norta.com first. The Algiers Point ferry crosses from the foot of Canal Street for the cheapest view of the skyline. The French Quarter and the Central Business District are walkable end to end and a car is a liability in both; the airport sits 18 km west of downtown. Other bases start from our United States country page.

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