New Orleans is located in southeastern Louisiana, straddling the Mississippi River. It is coextensive with Orleans Parish, meaning that the boundaries of the city and the parish are the same. It is bounded by the parishes of St. Tammany (north), St. Bernard (east), Plaquemines (south) and Jefferson (south and west). Lake Pontchartrain, part of which is included in the city limits, lies to the north and Lake Borgne lies to the east.The city is named after Philippe II, Duc d'Orléans, Regent of France, and is well known for its multicultural and multilingual heritage cuisine, architecture, music (particularly as the birthplace of jazz), and its annual Mardi Gras and other celebrations and festivals. The city is often referred to as the "most unique" city in America.New Orleans Louisiana is one of the must-see destinations in the U.S. Recently making headlines for the disaster of Hurricane Katrina a few years ago, New Orleans Louisiana has made an amazing comeback and made Travel & Leisure magazine’s destination of the year in 2007.

New Orleans reached its most consequential position as an economic and population center in relation to other American cities in the decades prior to 1860; as late as that year it was the nation's fifth-largest city and by far the largest in the American South. Though New Orleans continued to grow in size, from the mid-19th century onwards, first the emerging industrial and railroad hubs of the Midwest overtook the city in population, then the rapidly growing metropolises of the Pacific Coast in the decades before and after the turn of the 20th century, then other Sun Belt cities in the South and West in the post-World War II period surpassed New Orleans in population.Consequently, New Orleans has periodically mounted attempts to regain its economic vigor and pre-eminence over the past 150 years, with varying degrees of success.

By the mid-20th century, New Orleanians were observing with concern that the city was even ceding its traditional ranking as the leading urban area in the South. By 1950, Houston, Dallas and Atlanta (along with Seattle, outside of the South) had surpassed New Orleans in size, and 1960 witnessed Miami's eclipse of New Orleans, even as New Orleans' population was recorded as reaching its historic peak by the 1960 Census. Like most older American cities in this period, New Orleans' center city commenced losing inhabitants, though the New Orleans metropolitan area continued expanding in population - just never as rapidly as its metropolitan peers in the Sun Belt. While the port remained one of the largest in the nation, automation and containerization resulted in significant job losses. The city's relative fall in stature meant that its former role as banker and financial services provider to the South was inexorably supplanted by competing companies in its now-larger peer cities. New Orleans' economy was always more of a trade-based, commercial entrepot than manufacturing powerhouse, but the city's smallish manufacturing sector also shrank in the post-World War II period.

No trip to New Orleans is complete without sampling the famous local food! New Orleans dining is one of the best attractions the city offers, from local dives with po-boys to candy shops with pralines, to the elegant five star Brennan’s Sunday New Orleans Jazz brunch, tasting this luscious food is an experience you won’t soon forget! So don't miss it!