New Orleans Tourism and Louisiana Travel Guide: Hotels, Deals.

New Orleans Tourism and Louisiana Travel Guide: Offers Discount New Orleans Hotels, Travel Deals and Destinations Information.

Swathed in the romance of pirates, voodoo and Mardi Gras, the State of LOUISIANA is undeniably uniquely eclectic. Its history is barely on nodding terms with the view that America was the creation of the Pilgrim Fathers: its way of life is proudly set apart. This is the land of the rural, French speaking Cajuns that descended from the Acadians, eighteenth century French Canadian refugees, who live in the prairies and swamps in the South West of Louisiana, and the Creoles of jazzy, sassy New Orleans. The term Creole was originally used to define anyone born in the state to French or Spanish colonists, famed in the nineteenth century for their masked balls, family feuds and duels, as well as native born, French speaking slaves, but has since come to characterize anyone or anything native to Louisiana, and in particular its black population. Louisiana's spicy home cooked food, regular festivals and lilting French based dialect, and above all its music: jazz, R and B, Cajun and its Bluesy black counterpart, Zydeco Music, draw from all these cultures. Oddly enough, North Louisiana. Protestant Bible Belt country, where old plantation homes stand decaying in vast cottonfields, feels more Southern than the marshy bayous, shaded by prehistoric cypress trees and laced with wispy trails of Spanish moss, of the Catholic South of the State of Louisiana. For more New Orleans Tourism Information please visit our recommended Travel Websites below. We offer lodging recommendations for New Orleans hotels, dining, best destinations and more.

The French first settled Louisiana in 1682, braving swamps and plagues to harvest the abundant cypress trees, but Louisiana was sparsely inhabited before its first permanent settlement, the trading post of Natchitoches, was established in 1714. In 1760, Louis XV surreptitiously handed the City of New Orleans, along with all French territory west of the Mississippi River, to his Spanish cousin, Charles III, as a safeguard against the British. Louisiana remained Spanish until it was ceded to Napoleon in 1801, under the proviso that it should never change hands again. Just two years later, Napoleon, strapped for cash to fund his battles with the British in Europe, struck a bargain with president Thomas Jefferson known as the Louisiana Purchase. This tricky agreement handed over to the US all French lands between Canada and Mexico, from the Mississippi River to the Rockie Mountains, for a total cost of $15 million. The consequent Americanization of Louisiana was one of the most momentous periods in Louisiana's history, with the port of New Orleans, in its strategic position near the mouth of the Mississippi, growing to become one of the wealthiest cities in America. Though Louisiana seceded from the Union to join the Confederacy in 1861, there were essential differences between Louisiana and the rest of the slave driven South. The Black Code was drawn up by the French in 1685 to govern Saint Domingue (know as Haiti today) and established in Louisiana in 1724, had given slaves rights unequalled anywhere else, including permission to marry, meet socially and take Sundays off. The black population of New Orleans in particular were distinguished as exceptionally literate and sophisticated.

Though the State of Louisiana was not physically scarred by the Civil War, with few important battles fought on its lands, the economy was ravaged, and its social structures all but ruined. The Reconstruction era, too, hit particularly hard here, with the once great city of New Orleans suffering a period of unmatched lawlessness and racial hostility. In time the economy, at least, recovered, benefiting from the key importance of the mighty Mississippi River and the discovery of nearby offshore oil, but over the last century the State of Louisiana has come to rely more and more heavily upon tourism, centered around the City of New Orleans and Cajun country. It isn't hard to see why: whether canoeing along a moss tangled bayou, dining in a antique Creole cottage on spicy, buttery crawfish, or dancing on a steamy starlit night to the best live music in the nation, very few tourists fail to fall in love with Louisiana.

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