Breaux Bridge / Pont-Breaux

Not long ago crawfish were poor people's food. Before the Civil War they went mostly into gumbo and bisque, and the poor ate them mainly when floods brought them close; catching them was closer to berry picking than fishing, with baited twine and nets. Breaux Bridge's festival, begun in 1959, helped change that attitude and has grown to draw more than 100,000 visitors. French-speaking townspeople first called the town the crawfish capital of the world, and House Speaker Bob Angelle later made the title official.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cypress Island Preserve at Lake Martin — 4.9 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.
• Vermilionville — 7.0 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.
• Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site — 11 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.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 11 mi
  The Mother Church of the Acadians, founded in 1765 on St. Martin Square in St. Martinville, with a late 1870s Lourdes grotto and, a block away, the Evangeline Oak on Bayou Teche.

More markers nearby

• Cajun Warrior — steps away
• Scholastique Picou Breaux — steps away
• Pont Breaux, Louisiane — steps away
• Most Rev. Jules B. Jeanmard, D.D. — steps away