Avery Island & New Iberia: Tabasco, Jungle Gardens & Bayou Teche

Edmund McIlhenny began making his pepper sauce on Avery Island in 1868, three years after returning to find his Louisiana plantation destroyed by the Civil War. The formula — Capsicum frutescens peppers from Avery Island's salt dome soil, Avery Island rock salt, and aged red wine vinegar — has not fundamentally changed in 155 years. Avery Island is a salt dome, one of five in Iberia Parish, where the ground rises 163 feet above the surrounding marsh on a massive underground pillar of rock salt — the same salt vein that made southern Louisiana's antebellum sugar industry viable. The free factory tour covers the aging process (three years in white oak barrels), the pepper mash pressing room, and the bottling line that ships 750,000 bottles of Tabasco to 195 countries annually. The museum displays original 19th-century pepper sauce bottles, Edmund McIlhenny's original correspondence, and Tabasco merchandise across 150 years of advertising history.

Edward Avery McIlhenny — naturalist son of the Tabasco founder — began creating the Jungle Gardens on Avery Island in 1895, importing plants from around the world to a 250-acre subtropical garden that now contains one of the most eclectic botanical landscapes in the American South: ancient live oaks, bamboo forest, tropical camellias (the largest private camellia collection in North America), a 100-year-old Buddha statue believed to date from around 1000 CE and purchased in China in 1936, and the Bird City sanctuary — a nesting colony of great and snowy egrets that McIlhenny established in 1895 to protect the birds from the plume hunters who were decimating wading bird populations across Louisiana. The sanctuary now shelters thousands of nesting egrets from February through July; the sight of the white birds in the cypress trees above the bayou is one of the great wildlife spectacles of the Louisiana Gulf Coast.

Shadows-on-the-Teche is a National Trust for Historic Preservation property in the heart of downtown New Iberia — a Greek Revival plantation house built in 1834 by sugar planter David Weeks on a live-oak-shaded bank of Bayou Teche. The house remained in continuous family occupation for 122 years, and its extraordinary documentary archive of 17,000 letters, documents, and photographs spanning four generations makes it one of the most completely documented antebellum plantation sites in the country. General N.P. Banks used the house as his headquarters during the Union's Red River Campaign in 1863. The surrounding garden — giant live oaks, camellias, Spanish moss — makes even the exterior walk one of the most beautiful short strolls in Acadiana.

A short detour to the Bayou Teche Brewing taproom in Arnaudville — a craft brewery specializing in beers inspired by Louisiana's Cajun culture, including a brown ale brewed with Steen's cane syrup, a saison with Louisiana strawberries, and seasonal ales made with local ingredients. The taproom overlooks a quiet stretch of Bayou Teche; a relaxed late-afternoon stop on the drive east toward New Orleans.