▶ Watch the guide Give the first day to the French Quarter and get it out of your system: Jackson Square, the cathedral, beignets at Café du Monde, then Royal Street rather than Bourbon. Day two is the National WWII Museum, then the St. Charles streetcar through the Garden District. Keep the third for City Park, a po-boy at Parkway and Congo Square. Every night ends with music.
New Orleans is the least American-feeling city in the United States, and it got that way honestly. The French founded it in 1718, Spain ran it for four decades, and the US only bought it in 1803, by which point the grid, the Catholicism, the cooking and the habit of hiring a band for a funeral were already set.
Opened in 2000 as the National D-Day Museum and designated by Congress as the country's official museum of the war. It has grown into a campus of pavilions covering the road to war and both theatres. Oral histories run through all of it, which is what separates this from a hall of hardware.
The Vieux Carré is the original city, laid out as a grid in the 1720s. The cathedral holds the middle of the square, flanked by the Cabildo, where the Louisiana Purchase was transferred in 1803. Walk Royal and Chartres for the ironwork, and treat Bourbon Street as something to see once.
A bare room with a few benches, no amplification and a rotating collective of about sixty musicians who have kept traditional New Orleans jazz playing here since 1961. Nothing about it has been prettied up, and that is the point: the closest a visitor gets to the music in the room it came from.
Three blocks on the far side of Esplanade, and the answer to anyone who leaves Bourbon Street disappointed. The Spotted Cat runs trad jazz to a standing crowd, Snug Harbor is the seated room, d.b.a. books brass. Walk the strip, listen at the doors, and go in where the band sounds right.
The oldest continuously operating street railway in the world, running since 1835. The olive-green cars date from the 1920s, with wooden seats and windows that open, which is the correct way to travel under the live oaks. Get off at Washington Avenue for the Garden District.
Beignets under an unreasonable quantity of powdered sugar, and café au lait cut with chicory, a wartime economy that became the local taste. The original stand has been on this corner since 1862. Central Grocery, where the muffuletta was invented in 1906, is two doors along.
Thirteen hundred acres of live oaks and lagoons, larger than Central Park and a good deal less manicured. The art museum has anchored it since 1911, and the sculpture garden beside it holds around ninety works among the oaks, free to walk into.
Thirty-two acres in the Tremé, one of the oldest neighbourhoods of free people of colour in the country. Congo Square is the ground where enslaved and free Africans gathered on Sundays to trade, drum and dance, and the rhythms that survived there are widely credited as a root of jazz.
Opened in 1789 and the oldest cemetery still standing here. The water table sits close enough to the surface that New Orleans buries above ground, so this is a walled block of stuccoed tombs and wall vaults. The Archdiocese closed it to unaccompanied visitors, so you go in with a licensed guide or not at all.
Half an hour south, and the quickest honest look at the landscape New Orleans was built on: boardwalk trails over cypress swamp, bayou and floating marsh, with alligators and herons. It costs nothing, needs no boat and no guide, and explains south Louisiana better than any tour bus.
The original city, thirteen blocks by six, with Spanish colonial architecture behind French street names because two fires took the French buildings.
Immediately downriver of the Quarter, Creole cottages painted in colours no committee approved, and Frenchmen Street running through the middle of it.
Further downriver again: shotgun houses, artist studios, coffee roasters and the ramp up to Crescent Park. Quieter than the Marigny and further from everything.
One of the oldest neighbourhoods of free people of colour in the country. Congo Square and the brass band tradition come from these blocks.
Antebellum mansions on oak-shaded blocks, built by Americans who arrived after the Louisiana Purchase and settled upriver of the Creoles rather than among them.
The long stretch of the streetcar line past Audubon Park and the universities, out to Oak Street and the river bend. The rooms locals fill on a weeknight.
Nineteenth-century cotton warehouses turned into galleries, hotels and the museum quarter, with the WWII Museum and the Ogden a block apart.
A ferry ride across the Mississippi and a different pace entirely: Victorian and Creole houses, and the best skyline view in New Orleans from the levee path.
Carnival opens on Twelfth Night and builds through parades in the two weeks before Fat Tuesday.
The Mardi Gras Indians parade in full beaded suits on the Sunday nearest St. Joseph's Day.
Free stages across the Quarter and along the riverfront, and the locals' alternative to Jazz Fest. Four days in April.
Twelve stages at the Fair Grounds over two long weekends, with headliners alongside brass bands, gospel and Mardi Gras Indians.
The largest celebration of Black culture and music, filling the Superdome at night and the convention centre by day.
A weekend of trad jazz and brass built around Louis Armstrong's birthday on 4 August, held in and around the French Quarter.
Five days over the Labor Day weekend and one of the largest LGBTQ gatherings in the country, centred on the upper Quarter.
Réveillon menus in the old dining rooms all month, plus caroling in Jackson Square and bonfires on the levees on Christmas Eve.
Eleven miles west of downtown in Kenner, with a terminal that opened in 2019. There is no rail link: the Airport Express bus runs to the CBD, and rideshare picks up from arrivals.
Five streetcar lines: St. Charles, Canal with its two branches, Riverfront, and Rampart-St Claude. Day and week passes are bought through the transit app or on board with exact change.
One station for Amtrak and the intercity buses: overnight to Chicago, the Crescent to New York, the Sunset Limited west to Los Angeles. The streetcar stops at the door.
A dark roux, the trinity of onion, celery and bell pepper, then seafood or chicken and andouille, over rice.
Louisiana French bread, crisp outside and light inside, filled with fried shrimp, oysters or roast beef.
Square, yeasted, deep-fried and buried in powdered sugar, eaten three to a plate with chicory café au lait.
A round sesame loaf layered with mortadella, salami, provolone and olive salad, invented at Central Grocery.
Crawfish tails smothered in a blond roux with the trinity, poured over rice.
Monday food, from the days when the wash took all day and a pot of beans could be left with a ham bone in it.
Gulf oysters cooked over an open flame in garlic butter with parmesan, until the shells blacken.
Rice cooked in the pot with stock, sausage, chicken and often shrimp.
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