Mammoth Spring State Park
One of the world’s largest springs feeds a blue-green lake, historic dam, Spring River, fish hatchery, and restored railroad depot.
Places and wildlife — page 26
Browse Explore’s field guide to destinations, wildlife, art, and the natural world. Open a discovery for practical details and background.
Strawberry Darter
This small Arkansas-endemic darter lives in clear headwater streams of the Strawberry River system, holding close to gravel and cobble riffles.
Cossatot Leafcup
Cossatot leafcup occurs only in a small western Arkansas watershed, where moist forest openings support a tall, easily overlooked endemic herb.
Moore’s Delphinium
Moore’s delphinium is an Arkansas endemic whose spurred blue-violet flowers rise from rocky openings in the Ouachita and adjoining uplands.
Loblolly Pine
Arkansas’s state tree is a fast-growing southern pine whose long three-needle bundles, broad bark plates, and working-forest history shape the Coastal Plain.
Maple-leaf Oak
One of America’s rarest trees, maple-leaf oak is restricted to a handful of dry, rocky mountaintops in western Arkansas.
Yellowcheek Darter
An endangered fish holds to fast, clean Arkansas headwater riffles, turning loose rubble, uninterrupted current, and sediment control into the boundaries of survival.
Paleback Darter
The paleback darter occupies a handful of clear upper Caddo River tributaries, making clean gravel and uninterrupted headwater flow its whole world.
Caddo Madtom
A minute nocturnal catfish occupies clean gravel and rubble in one Arkansas river system, making intact cover and confidential locations more valuable than a forced sighting.
Magazine Mountain Shagreen
An entire snail species occupies scattered cool talus pockets on one Arkansas mountain, making shade, leaf litter, crevices, and undisturbed stone more important than the chance of seeing a shell.
Northern Mockingbird
Arkansas’s state bird patrols open neighborhood territories, flashing white wings and stitching other birds’ sounds into long improvised songs.
Arkansas Bluestar
This Ouachita Mountain endemic pairs pale blue spring stars with feathery foliage that turns luminous gold, earning worldwide garden use.
Pelton’s Rose-gentian
Pelton’s rose-gentian is an Arkansas-endemic annual of thin, rocky glades, where a brief pink flowering season depends on intact open habitat.
Diana Fritillary
Arkansas’s state butterfly appears to be two species until sex explains the palette: orange-banded males and larger blue-spotted females share one violet-dependent forest life cycle.
The National WWII Museum
Immersive campaign galleries, oral histories, restored aircraft, and a submarine experience connect World War II strategy to individual service and civilian lives.
New Orleans Museum of Art
Global collections, Louisiana art, photography, decorative arts, and more than ninety outdoor sculptures meet at the edge of City Park.
Ogden Museum of Southern Art
A focused collection of art from the American South brings regional modernism, self-taught practice, photography, craft, and contemporary voices into conversation.
The Cabildo
Inside a Spanish Colonial landmark, objects and documents trace Indigenous homelands, colonial regimes, the Louisiana Purchase, statehood, and the Battle of New Orleans.
The Presbytère
Mardi Gras craft and Hurricane Katrina testimony share a landmark beside Jackson Square; building work can interrupt access, so confirm reopening before visiting.
The Historic New Orleans Collection
Free galleries, changing exhibitions, restored buildings, and a deep research collection make New Orleans history readable through objects, maps, photographs, and architecture.
Capitol Park Museum
Statewide history galleries connect Indigenous cultures, slavery, migration, industry, disaster, politics, music, foodways, and everyday creativity across Louisiana.
Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame and Northwest Louisiana History Museum
Louisiana athletic achievement shares a sculptural museum with Caddo, Creole, river, military, and community history from the state’s northwest.
Whitney Plantation
A former sugar plantation uses buildings, memorials, research, and guided interpretation to center the lives and resistance of enslaved people.
Laura Plantation
A guided tour uses a colorful Creole house, plantation records, family memoir, work spaces, and cabins to examine sugar, kinship, slavery, and language.
Chalmette Battlefield and National Cemetery
The landscape of the 1815 Battle of New Orleans shares ground with a national cemetery and interpretation of the many communities drawn into war.
Cane River Creole National Historical Park
Oakland and Magnolia preserve different parts of a Cane River plantation system shaped by slavery, Creole communities, tenant farming, agriculture, and long continuity.
Shadows-on-the-Teche
A National Trust property combines a Greek Revival house, Bayou Teche garden, and unusually rich family papers with histories of slavery, war, and preservation.
Fort St. Jean Baptiste State Historic Site
A full-scale reconstruction interprets the French colonial post that guarded trade and diplomacy near the young Natchitoches settlement.
Poverty Point World Heritage Site
Six concentric ridges, massive mounds, a plaza, and far-reaching exchange reveal an Indigenous hunter-gatherer center unprecedented in ancient North America.
Marksville State Historic Site
A horseshoe-shaped embankment and burial mounds connect Louisiana to the broader Hopewell interaction sphere nearly two thousand years ago.
Los Adaes State Historic Site
The archaeological remains of a Spanish mission and presidio reveal a porous frontier shaped as much by Caddo diplomacy and trade as imperial rivalry.
New Orleans Botanical Garden
Depression-era garden rooms, tropical conservatories, Louisiana plants, sculpture, roses, and working demonstration beds unfold inside City Park.
Longue Vue House and Gardens
A carefully integrated house and series of garden rooms reveal twentieth-century design, philanthropy, domestic labor, and New Orleans horticulture.
Jungle Gardens
A semitropical driving and walking garden crosses live-oak groves, marsh edge, camellias, azaleas, a historic Buddha shrine, and an egret rookery.
Rip Van Winkle Gardens
Semitropical gardens and an 1870 mansion overlook Lake Peigneur, where a 1980 drilling accident transformed the salt-dome landscape.
Audubon Zoo
A century-old Uptown zoo combines global conservation exhibits with Louisiana swamp ecology beneath one of New Orleans’s major live-oak canopies.
Audubon Aquarium
Mississippi River, Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean reef, rainforest, and conservation exhibits connect New Orleans to the waters surrounding it.
Global Wildlife Center
Guided safari wagons cross hundreds of acres where large herds move through managed pasture, offering close observation under strict feeding rules.
Barataria Preserve
Boardwalk and natural-surface trails reveal bottomland forest, cypress swamp, marsh, bayou, and the changing hydrology of the Mississippi delta.
Chicot State Park
Louisiana’s largest state park wraps hiking, paddling, fishing, camping, and the state arboretum around a cypress-edged lake.
Fontainebleau State Park
A Lake Pontchartrain beach, pier, marsh, live oaks, trails, and brick sugar-mill ruins layer recreation over plantation and industrial history.
Grand Isle State Park
Beach, dunes, bird migration, fishing, and exposed Gulf weather make Louisiana’s only inhabited barrier island both inviting and visibly vulnerable.
Kisatchie National Forest
Louisiana’s only national forest protects longleaf pine, sandstone hills, prairies, bayous, military landscapes, campgrounds, and hundreds of trail miles.
Wild Azalea Trail
A long point-to-point route crosses rolling longleaf and hardwood forest, creek bottoms, camp areas, and spring azalea bloom in Kisatchie.
Tammany Trace
A paved former rail line links Covington, Abita Springs, Mandeville, Lacombe, and Slidell through pine woods, wetlands, trailheads, and town centers.
Longleaf Vista Interpretive Trail
A compact loop descends through sandstone outcrops, ravines, and fire-shaped longleaf habitat beneath one of Louisiana’s broadest upland views.
Atchafalaya Basin
A vast distributary floodplain carries Mississippi and Red River water through cypress swamp, lakes, bayous, bottomland forest, and working communities.
Mississippi River Delta
Distributaries, sediment, marsh, navigation channels, levees, and Gulf energy form one of the world’s most engineered and rapidly changing deltas.