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Few American cities carry their history as visibly as New Orleans. The French colonial grid of the Vieux Carré, the raised cottages of Tremé, the antebellum mansions lining Prytania Street in the Garden District: the city wears its past on its facades, its street names, and in the music that drifts from open doorways on any given evening. Founded in 1718 by the French Mississippi Company on a crescent of land between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River, New Orleans developed under French, Spanish, and eventually American governance, absorbing each influence without fully surrendering to any of them. The result is a city that feels genuinely unlike anywhere else in the United States.

The French Quarter is where most first-time visitors orient themselves, and with good reason. Jackson Square anchors the neighbourhood, with St Louis Cathedral rising behind it and the Pontalba Buildings framing either side, their cast-iron galleries among the most photographed in the South. But the Quarter rewards those who move beyond Bourbon Street. Royal Street's antique shops and the quiet residential blocks towards Esplanade Avenue offer a more considered version of the neighbourhood. A guided tour of the Hermann-Grima House, one of the finest examples of American Greek Revival architecture in the city, gives genuine context to the domestic life of nineteenth-century New Orleans, including the only intact Creole kitchen still operating in the Quarter.