A Warehouse District loft where New Orleans learns to DJ and dances till two. ARORA at 828 South Peters Street is a creative performance venue and production loft that splits the difference between studio and nightclub: high-fidelity Funktion-One sound, immersive boutique lighting, and a calendar that runs from DJ Academy workshops and industry classes by day to open-decks community nights, label showcases and late-night underground parties after dark. The formula is deliberately educational as.....

Spread across 58 oak-shaded acres in Uptown New Orleans, the Audubon Zoo grew out of animal exhibits that date back to the 1884 World Cotton Centennial and the flight cage and grounds developed in the decades after; the zoo itself is generally dated to 1914. It takes its name from the artist and naturalist John James Audubon, who lived in the city in the 1820s, and it occupies a corner of Audubon Park between Magazine Street and the Mississippi River. For much of the twentieth century the zoo h.....

Cutting through the heart of the French Quarter, Bourbon Street runs about thirteen blocks from Canal Street to Esplanade Avenue and is, for many visitors, shorthand for New Orleans nightlife. Its name has nothing to do with the whiskey; the royal engineer Adrien de Pauger laid out the Quarter's grid in the early 1720s and named the street for the House of Bourbon, the family then ruling France. The city itself had been founded a few years earlier, in 1718. For roughly its first century and a h.....

An unmistakable feature of the New Orleans skyline, the Caesars Superdome is one of the most famous stadiums in the United States, its vast curved roof rising above the central business district. Opened in 1975, the domed arena was an engineering landmark on completion, boasting one of the largest fixed roofs of its kind in the world, and it has remained the home of the New Orleans Saints of the National Football League ever since. The stadium seats around seventy-three thousand spectators for .....

New Orleans built its party plaza on top of a dead shopping mall that was built on top of a moved cemetery. Champions Square, on LaSalle Street directly off the Caesars Superdome's Gate C grand staircase, opened on 21 August 2010 as a 13.5-million-dollar outdoor festival plaza on the footprint of the New Orleans Centre mall, which had never reopened after Hurricane Katrina flooded the city in 2005 and was demolished in spring 2010 - the site's deeper history reaches back to the Girod Street Ceme.....

Its first job was hosting a World's Fair. The building that became the New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center opened its Great Hall for the 1984 Louisiana World Exposition - the last World's Fair held on American soil - then welcomed its first trade show, a helicopter exhibition, in January 1985. Named for Ernest "Dutch" Morial, New Orleans's first African American mayor, the centre stretches nearly eleven blocks along the Mississippi River at 900 Convention Center Boulevard. Expansions.....

A small, characterful live-music room on Freret Street in Uptown New Orleans, Gasa Gasa earned a devoted following as one of the city's most distinctive independent venues. Housed in a converted building with an adjoining coffee-and-art space, the room blended music, visual art and community in a way that captured the creative, do-it-yourself spirit of its neighbourhood and stood apart from the city's larger and more famous music halls. The venue was an intimate space holding only a couple of h.....

General Custer raced his own horses at the inaugural meet, a Russian grand duke watched from the stands, and Degas - whose family lived nearby - sketched the scenes. The Fair Grounds Race Course, at 1751 Gentilly Boulevard in New Orleans, ran its first card under the Louisiana Jockey Club on 13 April 1872 and is the second-oldest continuously operating racetrack in America. The racing history reaches even further: horses ran on the 145-acre Gentilly site from 1852 as the Union and later Creole .....

The brief to the acousticians was poetry: build a room that sounds as warm as Louis Armstrong's horn. The New Orleans Jazz Market, at 1436 Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard in Central City, opened with an April 2015 ribbon-cutting as the first performance hall built for a standing jazz orchestra in the music's birthplace. The building is adaptive reuse: a long-vacant former Gators department store - on the site of the historic Dryades Market, dating to 1849 - was converted into a 350-to-360-seat au.....

Beyond the music and cuisine for which it is famous, New Orleans sits amid a watery landscape of bayous, swamps and the great Mississippi River, opening the door to a surprising range of outdoor activities. For visitors willing to step outside the French Quarter, the surrounding region offers wetlands teeming with wildlife, plantation country, urban parks and waterways that reward exploration on foot, by paddle or aboard a boat. The signature outdoor experience is the swamp tour. Operators just.....