Alligators!

Lake Fausse Pointe State Park covers about 6,000 acres beside the Atchafalaya Basin, straddling Iberia and St. Martin parishes. The land was once Chitimacha country. Marked canoe trails lead to five primitive campsites that can only be reached by paddle, and the park also has furnished cabins and RV sites. The wildlife list goes well past alligators, to white-tailed deer, raccoons, black bears, bobcats, armadillos and cottonmouths. The main road and conference center are named for the late state representative Bo Ackal of New Iberia.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chitimacha Museum — 13 mi
  The Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana's own museum at Charenton: the tribe's account of its territory, the French wars and enslavement, the land held in trust, and river cane baskets.
• Shadows-on-the-Teche — 13 mi
  A National Trust site in New Iberia built 1831 to 1834 for sugar planters David and Mary Weeks, now interpreted around the 1,112 people the Weeks family enslaved, among them Charity Polk, Amos, Patty, Isaac and Louisa.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 14 mi
  A museum in the St. Martinville Cultural Heritage Center on the arrival of Africans in Southwest Louisiana, slavery, the free people of color and Reconstruction, with the fourteen-panel exhibit The Shackles of Memory.
• Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site — 14 mi
  A bayou-side state site on former Attakapas hunting ground, with a raised Creole cottage of about 1815, a reproduction 1800 farmstead and its slave quarters, and the story behind Longfellow's Evangeline.

More markers nearby

• New Acadia / Nouvelle Acadie — 7.8 mi
• Beau Pre-Circa 1828 — 9.7 mi
• Nicholas Provôt — 11 mi
• Oak and Pine Alley — 12 mi