New Orleans could not exist without water, and on this tour, the Mississippi River becomes the thread connecting more than three centuries of the city's history.

During this two-hour walking tour, follow the riverfront and French Quarter as we explore how the Mississippi created the land beneath New Orleans, why Indigenous communities understood this landscape long before European colonization, and why the French chose to build a city in a place where water would always determine how people lived.

This is much more than a river tour. Through the stories of enslaved people, merchants, immigrants, laborers, musicians, engineers, and ordinary New Orleanians, discover how the river created extraordinary wealth while participating in systems of slavery and forced migration, how the port brought cultures from around the world together, and how New Orleans music traveled far beyond the city.

We will also explore the centuries-long effort to control water through levees, drainage canals, pumps, floodwalls, and coastal engineering, from early colonial projects through the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and Hurricane Katrina. Along the way, we will consider a question that has become increasingly important to the future of New Orleans: after centuries spent trying to control water, must the city now become better at learning how to live with it?

“New Orleans Katrina: Built by Water Tested by Storm” tells the story of New Orleans through the force that made the city possible and continues to determine its future.