Grand Isle Beach

The highway runs 436 miles from Shreveport to the Gulf, and at the southern end it reaches the only sand you can dig your toes into for a hundred miles around New Orleans. Grand Isle sits at the mouth of Barataria Bay — seven miles of public beach on Louisiana's only inhabited barrier island, where fishing piers stretch into open water and Highway 1 finally runs out of road. The drive down covers some of Louisiana's most fragile wetlands, those disappearing acres of marsh and open water that once buffered everything inland. Grand Isle knows what happens when that buffer fails. The island has absorbed Betsy in 1965, Katrina in 2005, Gustav in 2008, and Ida in 2021 — Hurricane Ida's eastern eyewall hit on the sixteenth anniversary of Katrina and damaged every structure on the island. In 2010, oil from the BP Deepwater Horizon spill washed ashore. After each disaster, the beach reopened. Kate Chopin spent her summers here for over a decade. She set *The Awakening* on Grand Isle, and the novel's final scene unfolds on this same stretch of Gulf. In April, the island hosts the Grand Isle Migratory Bird Festival, timed to the spring return of flocks crossing the Gulf from South America. The few remaining chenier forests — old-growth oaks and hackberries on elevated ridges built by Mississippi River sediment — give migrating birds a place to rest. Some of those oaks are over 125 years old. The sand is public. The Gulf is here. That's what you came for.