The Old Castillo Hotel

The National Register lists Jean Pierre Vasseur as architect and names 1835 as the significant year within a period of 1825 to 1849, with commerce and social history as its themes. The Acadian Memorial calls it the only surviving hotel built for the Teche steamboat trade. Later it was a restaurant and tavern that hosted balls and banquets, and from 1881 to 1988 it belonged to the Order of Mercy sisters, who ran it as a girls' school. It stands beside the Evangeline Oak, outside the oak's park.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• African American Museum, St. Martinville — steps away
  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.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — steps away
  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.
• Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site — 1.0 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.
• Cypress Island Preserve at Lake Martin — 7.1 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

• Evangeline Oak — steps away
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow — steps away
• Deportation Cross — steps away
• The Eternal Flame — steps away