Louisiana's elopement geography organizes itself around three very different visual worlds. New Orleans's French Quarter and Garden District offer urban elopement settings unlike any other American city — Creole townhouse architecture, iron lacework balconies, hidden courtyard gardens, and the formal live oak avenues of Esplanade Avenue and Magazine Street. An elopement in the French Quarter can be conducted in a private courtyard hired for the occasion or in one of the Quarter's public squares; Jackson Square in front of St. Louis Cathedral is the most dramatic public ceremony backdrop in the state.
The River Road plantation country between New Orleans and Baton Rouge preserves a landscape of antebellum live oak allées — long avenues of ancient oaks whose canopies meet overhead to form a green tunnel — that's genuinely one of the most distinctive photographic settings in the American South. Oak Alley Plantation's famous quarter-mile oak tunnel is the most photographed example, but the adjacent Laura Plantation and the lesser-visited Houmas House both have mature oak avenue approaches.
The Atchafalaya Basin, the largest river swamp in North America, spreads across south-central Louisiana in a world of cypress and water tupelo trees standing in dark, tannin-stained water, Spanish moss hanging in long sheets from the branches, and the silence of a wetland ecosystem that has no exact equivalent elsewhere in the continental US. Couples who want something otherworldly and genuinely Louisiana — not the city, not the plantations — find the basin extraordinary.
