The 'Unofficial Capital Of After-Dark Adventure' In America Is A Southern Gulf Paradise

If you're a night owl by nature, there's a good chance that when you travel, you're going to explore your destination after dark. Known as "noctourism," this metagenre of travel takes many forms, from stargazing and nighttime scuba dives to haunting city walks and midnight raves. 

At night, rural destinations become places of abyssal intrigue, while urban centers light up and shed all propriety and pretense, completely changing the perspective of those who experience it. According to research by travel eSim provider Holafly, later reported in outlets like Fox Weather, New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz and culture capital of the American South, is also the nation's number one noctourism destination, the so-called "unofficial capital of after-dark adventure."

New Orleans is full of after-dark adventure, with hundreds of night tours, legendary jazz clubs, the Creole restaurants and vibrant adult playground of Bourbon Street, and lively city districts where you can set up camp, eat a po'boy or a helping of beignets, and spend the night people watching. An average year-round temperature of 72 degrees Fahrenheit is an extra incentive for people to get out in the evenings. New Orleans was also the destination with the highest noise and light pollution in Holafly's analysis. Altogether, these factors meant the Big Easy beat out competitors like Denver (No. 2), Florida's Everglades (No. 3), Key West (No. 4), and Savannah, Georgia (No. 5) for the prize of America's best city for travelers after dark.

Lively jazz spills from the wooden porches and street corners of Frenchmen Street in the heart of New Orleans; here's a good place to start your nighttime explorations. While a lot of the jazz is open-air, Snug Harbor, enclosed by a renovated 19th-century storefront, hosts excellent ticketed shows seven nights a week. Nearby club Blue Nile, where the atmosphere is redolent of the Golden Age of Jazz, hosts regular funk, soul, jazz, and blues concerts. Jiving to music on Frenchmen Street is considered one of the unmissable things to do on a New Orleans vacation, and while you're here, be sure to peruse the curios and crafts at the Frenchmen Art Market, open every night.

Night tours are also part of the fabric of New Orleans, and they're a great way to learn more about the city. There are tours for people who want to drink their way through the French Quarter, tours for fans of voodoo and vampires, and dozens of guided tours that focus on the city's history of ghosts and hauntings. New Orleans Ghost Adventures Tours offers numerous tours in this category, suggesting the Big Easy is so lively at night that even the dead are roused back to life. Its offerings include a haunted pub crawl, an exploration of derelict buildings, and a cemetery bus tour.

Back in the world of the living, you can take to the Mississippi River on an evening steamboat cruise, where you'll drink craft cocktails and be serenaded by live jazz. And even in the Garden District, famed for its lavish mansions and unique architecture, there's fun to be had at night, whether that's on a streetcar cocktail crawl along St. Charles Avenue or dining at the James Beard Award-winning Commander's Palace.