Bayou Courtableau at Bayou Teche Headwaters

Bayou Teche begins here at Port Barre, where it draws water from Bayou Courtableau, and runs about 125 miles south through St. Martin, Iberia and St. Mary parishes. No one is sure where the name comes from. One theory ties it to a Chitimacha word for snake, and a Chitimacha story tells of a giant snake whose rotting body left the hollow that became the bayou. Another proposal makes it a French form of Deutsch. Geologists say the Teche carried the Mississippi's main flow roughly 2,800 to 4,500 years ago.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Le Vieux Village and the Venus House — 7.4 mi
  A heritage park in Opelousas built around the Venus House of about 1791, the home of a free Creole woman of color, Marie Francois Venus, with an old schoolhouse, Methodist church and the visitor center's zydeco music exhibit.
• Atchafalaya Welcome Center — 20 mi
  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.
• Vermilionville — 24 mi
  A living-history village of about 23 acres on Bayou Vermilion in Lafayette, opened in 1990 to interpret the Native peoples, Acadians, Creoles and people of African descent of the Attakapas region.
• Cypress Island Preserve at Lake Martin — 25 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.

More markers nearby

• Port Barre — 1.1 mi
• Washington School — 7.1 mi
• Bayou Courtableau — 7.1 mi
• Washington — 7.1 mi