New Orleans Garden District & Lafayette Cemetery Gates Tour

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Free cancellationExcellent quality

1/8

Duration2h

GroupUp to 16

LanguagesEN

Mobile ticketAccepted

Mansions & Marble Tombs: The Garden District's Hidden Stories

You walk through the Garden District's mansion-lined streets with a local guide who points out celebrity homes and architectural history, ride past the St. Charles Streetcar, and view Lafayette Cemetery #1's aboveground tombs from the gates while learning about New Orleans' burial customs and the stories of the people buried there. The tour is wheelchair accessible, moves at a comfortable pace, and takes two hours total.

Step-by-step itinerary

Garden District and Lafayette Cemetery Tour

Walk Garden District streets
See antebellum homes
Learn Creole and American history
Visit Lafayette Cemetery gates
View aboveground tombs
Hear burial customs stories
Spot film locations
Discover tropical plant life

The Experience

Picture the iron gates of Lafayette Cemetery rising against a humid New Orleans afternoon, the aboveground tombs glowing white behind wrought-iron fencing, and your guide pointing out the exact spot where Brad Pitt's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" was filmed. That's the opening frame of this two-hour walking tour through the Garden District and along the cemetery gates—a neighborhood where 19th-century Creole and American residents built competing empires in stone and stucco, and where the dead live above ground in what locals call "cities of the dead." The City of New Orleans has temporarily closed Lafayette Cemetery to the public, but the tour still happens from the gates, and honestly, your guide can show you everything that matters from there.

You'll start on St. Charles Avenue, where the historic streetcar still runs, and walk past the actual homes of Anne Rice, Nicolas Cage, John Goodman, and Sandra Bullock—not celebrity gossip stops, but architectural landmarks that tell you something about who settled here and why. The cornstalk fence, a cast-iron oddity that looks like it sprouted from the ground, sits on Royal Street and gets its own story. Your guide, knowledgeable and not the type to bore you, weaves together the neighborhood's split personality: the Creole plantation owners who built first, then the American merchants who arrived later and built bigger, louder houses to prove a point. The tropical plants—magnolias, live oaks draped in Spanish moss—frame everything, and the whole thing moves at a pace that lets you actually absorb the details instead of just checking boxes.

The cemetery portion is where the tour gets strange and compelling. Lafayette Cemetery #1 sits behind those gates, and from there you learn about New Orleans' peculiar burial practices—why bodies go above ground in tombs instead of into the earth, what the Jefferson Fire Company No. 22 society tomb means, and which crypt inspired Anne Rice's "The Witching Hour." You'll see the film sites from "Interview with the Vampire," "Double Jeopardy," and "Deja Vu," and hear the stories of the people actually buried there, traced through the names on the gravestones. It's not morbid; it's history told through the people who made the city what it is. Small-group size means your guide can answer the questions that come up, and the whole thing wraps in two hours, leaving you the rest of your afternoon free.

What’s included

Your tour includes a local guide, a two-hour walking experience through the Garden District with views of celebrity homes and architectural landmarks, passage along St. Charles Avenue where the historic streetcar runs, and a guided viewing of Lafayette Cemetery #1's aboveground tombs from the gates with stories about New Orleans' burial customs and the people interred there.

Good to know

Easy physical levelWheelchair accessibleAccessible transportStroller friendlyPets welcomePublic transport nearby

Operated by Historic New Orleans Tours

Is this one for you?Book this if you want the Garden District's real history—the architecture, the names, the why behind the mansions—without arranging your own research or getting lost on the streets. The small-group format and local guide mean you hear the stories that don't make it into guidebooks, and the two-hour length fits into an afternoon without eating your whole day.