10 Best Historic Sites in New Orleans (Costs & Tips, 2026)

The cathedral behind the square is the oldest continuously operating Catholic cathedral in the United States, its three steeples visible from nearly every riverfront photo of the city ever taken, and walking in during open hours costs nothing at all. The square itself, ringed by street artists and fortune tellers, is free to sit in for as long as you want.

The actual paperwork transferring Louisiana from France to the United States in 1803 was signed inside this building — not a plaque commemorating it somewhere nearby, the real room. Fifteen dollars gets you in ($13 for Louisiana residents), fair for a site of this historical weight.

A guided tour here runs about $25, mandatory since 2015 after vandalism concerns — it buys access to Marie Laveau's tomb inside this 1789 cemetery, the oldest surviving example of the above-ground burial style the city adopted because its water table sits too high for anything else.

About $25 for the self-guided audio tour (guided runs $32) and a 45-minute drive to Wallace gets you into the first museum in the country built specifically to tell the story of American slavery from the perspective of the enslaved, not the plantation owners. First-person narratives and a memorial wall listing over 100,000 names make this genuinely difficult, and genuinely necessary.

The Cabildo's twin building across Jackson Square holds a full permanent Mardi Gras exhibit, real krewe costumes and float pieces on display year-round, so the tradition is genuinely explained rather than just glimpsed in passing during Carnival season itself. Fifteen dollars, same Louisiana State Museum pricing as the Cabildo, and buying tickets to both museums on site together knocks a couple dollars off each.

Built in 1831, this is one of the few French Quarter homes still using its original 19th-century courtyard kitchen for live cooking demonstrations — a guided tour runs $20 — giving a genuinely working sense of Creole domestic life instead of just a roped-off room of furniture.

Completed in 1752, this is the oldest documented building in the entire Mississippi River Valley, having somehow survived both of the great fires that leveled most of the rest of the French Quarter in the 1780s. Ten dollars for a self-guided visit through the archive and gardens.

The full 75-minute guided house-and-gardens tour runs about $36 at this eight-acre 1930s estate, modeled on European classical gardens and sitting a short drive from downtown — less famous than the French Quarter's historic homes but genuinely grander in scale, with fountains still running through the formal grounds. A gardens-only self-guided ticket, without the house, runs closer to $16 if the full tour is more than you're after.

About $25 and an hour's drive to Vacherie gets you into a Creole, not Anglo-American, plantation, run by a matriarchal line of women owners across four generations — a genuinely different story from the antebellum-mansion narrative most plantation tours default to, told partly through the family's own surviving 5,000-page memoir.

Unlike St. Louis No. 1, this Garden District cemetery still allows free self-guided walking, no mandatory tour required — moss-draped tombs from 1833 sitting a few blocks from the neighborhood's famous mansions, and Anne Rice fans will recognize it from her novels. No admission fee at all.