Bayou Weekly

For three days at the end of every July, Grand Isle fills up. The barrier island at the bottom of Jefferson Parish swaps its quiet for boat trailers, a rodeo tent and weigh-in crowds, all for a fishing tournament its organizers call the oldest in the United States. The International Grand Isle Tarpon Rodeo was founded in 1928, which puts its 100th anniversary two summers away. This year's rodeo, held July 23 to 25, showed how much the island is at the mercy of the Gulf. Tropi

Every Louisiana kid learns early that the state has parishes where the rest of the country has counties. Fewer people could say why, or who actually decides when their parish road gets patched. The answer runs from Spanish colonial church records to the 1974 state constitution, and it explains why local government looks so different from one parish to the next. The word comes from the colonial era, when local life in French and Spanish Louisiana was organized around Catholic

In the far northeast corner of Louisiana, off Highway 577 in West Carroll Parish, a set of grassy ridges and mounds sits on the edge of Macon Ridge, overlooking Bayou Macon. From a pickup truck on the highway it can look like pasture. It is one of the most important archaeological sites in North America, and since 2014 it has shared a list with the pyramids of Giza and the Great Wall of China as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The site is Poverty Point, named for a 19th-century