Atchafalaya River (Atchafalaya Welcome Center)

Read the Basin as a forest and the numbers get strange. It holds about 1.4 million acres, roughly 70 percent of it wooded, in a strip about 20 miles wide and 150 long. Inside is a cypress-tupelo forest of some 260,000 acres, the largest remaining contiguous stand of coastal cypress in the country. Flood-control levees finished in the 1940s then pushed the river's sediment into an area about a third the size of the original basin, which changed where the water and silt go.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Atchafalaya Welcome Center — steps away
  A state welcome center inside the Atchafalaya Basin, the nation's largest river swamp, with exhibits on Basin history and life, a film, a crawfishing boat and French-speaking staff.
• Cypress Island Preserve at Lake Martin — 14 mi
  Nearly 10,000 acres of bottomland hardwood and cypress-tupelo swamp at the south end of Lake Martin, owned by The Nature Conservancy, with a boardwalk and a rookery of egrets, spoonbills and alligators.
• Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site — 15 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.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 16 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.

More markers nearby

• Louisiana Airborne Memorial Bridge — steps away
• Atchafalaya Floodway — 4.2 mi
• Atchafalaya River (Butte La Rose Boat Landing) — 4.8 mi
• Louis Hebert — 7.8 mi