St. Louis Cathedral & Jackson Square

St. Louis Cathedral is the face of New Orleans: the triple-spired white cathedral rising over Jackson Square that has anchored every postcard, film establishing-shot and hurricane-survival montage the city has produced — the oldest continuously active cathedral in the United States, on ground consecrated since 1727, rebuilt after fire in 1794 and remodelled to its current fairy-tale silhouette in 1850. It is a working Catholic cathedral with a parish older than the country, and its interior — Rococo altar, flags of the ten governments that have flown over Louisiana, ceiling murals restored after Katrina's near-miss — rewards the pause between square and beignet that most visitors almost take.

The self-guided audio tour is the sleeper upgrade: the cathedral's history is the city's history in miniature — Spanish benefactor Don Andrés Almonester y Roxas funding the rebuild (his remains beneath the floor, his descendants' pew still marked), Père Antoine, the beloved-and-complicated Capuchin whose name the adjacent alley carries and whose ghost the tour handles with New Orleans' characteristic ease, popes and kings and jazz funerals passing through one set of doors. Twenty minutes inside recalibrates everything you then see outside.

And outside is the point: Jackson Square is the South's most operatic public room — Andrew Jackson rearing in bronze at the centre, the Pontalba Buildings (America's oldest apartments) framing the sides, and the railings hung with the working city: painters, tarot readers, brass bands whose tuba lines carry to the river levee. The stacking is effortless because everything is adjacent: Café du Monde's beignets across Decatur, the Cabildo and Presbytère museums flanking the cathedral (the Louisiana history and Mardi Gras collections respectively — both underrated), the Moon Walk levee for the Mississippi's traffic, and Pirate's Alley beside the cathedral for the Faulkner House bookshop. Go morning for the soft light and the square waking up, or evening when the spires floodlight and the bands hit stride; the cathedral pauses for Mass and the square never pauses at all.