9 Best Free Things to Do in New Orleans
Wondering what free things to do in New Orleans? You’ve come to the right place. This guide covers the vibrant French Quarter, sprawling City Park, and plenty of live music venues where you won’t spend a dime. New Orleans has a reputation as an expensive city to visit, but the truth is that a lot of what makes it special doesn’t cost anything at all. The culture, the architecture, the music spilling out onto the streets — much of it is just there, waiting for you.
From historic cemeteries to scenic walks along the Mississippi River, New Orleans delivers some of the most memorable travel experiences in the country, and a surprisingly large number of them are completely free. Whether you’re here for a weekend or a week, this list will keep you busy without emptying your wallet. The nine sections below cover the best of what the city offers at no cost, organized so you can plan by neighborhood, interest, or mood.
1. Discover the French Quarter
The heart and soul of New Orleans, the French Quarter is a must-visit district often described as a living museum. Established in 1718, this historic neighborhood is known for its baroque ironwork balconies, leafy courtyards, and bubbling fountains, with each corner telling some part of the city’s layered past. You can hear street musicians around nearly every turn, and the energy of the place is hard to describe until you’ve actually walked through it. What makes it remarkable is that just wandering the streets here, with no particular destination in mind, is an experience in itself.
Exploring the French Quarter opens up a wide range of experiences. From the excitement of Bourbon Street to the quieter beauty of Jackson Square and the artistic stretch of Royal Street, there’s no shortage of things to see and do. Spend a day wandering the streets, browsing the French Market, or simply soaking in the atmosphere. The district is compact enough to cover on foot, but dense enough that you’ll keep finding things worth stopping for even after several hours of walking.
Bourbon Street
Bourbon Street is synonymous with New Orleans nightlife, and it earns its reputation. This historic strip is the city’s entertainment hub, with street performers, live music pouring out of doorways, and a lively crowd almost any time of day.
Whether you end up watching a brass band, chatting with a fortune teller, or simply people-watching from the sidewalk, it’s hard to leave without a story. It can get rowdy at night, especially on weekends, but even a daytime walk down Bourbon gives you a good feel for the street’s particular energy.
Jackson Square
Jackson Square is one of the most picturesque spots in the city, with a bronze statue of Andrew Jackson at its center and the magnificent St. Louis Cathedral, the oldest Catholic cathedral in continuous use in the United States, as its backdrop. The square draws artists, musicians, tarot readers, and tourists in equal measure, creating a scene that feels genuinely unique to New Orleans. On a good day you’ll find portrait painters set up along the fence, a jazz ensemble playing nearby, and the smell of beignets drifting over from across the street.
Surrounding the square are several notable attractions, including the Cabildo and the famous Café du Monde. Grab a beignet and a café au lait, watch the street performers work their crowd, or just sit and take it all in. It’s one of those places where you can easily burn an hour without realizing it.
Royal Street
Royal Street is the French Quarter’s quieter, more refined side. Lined with art galleries and antique shops, it offers a different window into the city’s cultural and historical fabric, and the architecture alone is worth a slow stroll. Many of the galleries here represent local artists working in styles that feel rooted in Louisiana’s culture and landscape, which gives the street a sense of place you don’t always find in tourist-heavy areas.
Window shopping along Royal Street is genuinely enjoyable even without buying anything. The galleries showcase everything from fine art to folk paintings, and the mix of locals and visitors browsing along the sidewalk gives the street a relaxed energy that Bourbon Street simply doesn’t have. It’s a good street to return to on a second or third day once you’ve gotten your bearings in the rest of the Quarter.
2. Free Tours and Walking Adventures
New Orleans is one of the best cities in the country to explore on foot, and there’s no shortage of free ways to do it. Each neighborhood has its own history and personality, from the elegant avenues of the Garden District to the buzzing blocks of the French Quarter. The city is also remarkably walkable for its size, and many of its best-known neighborhoods sit within a reasonable distance of each other, making it easy to string together a long walk that covers a lot of ground. You could easily spend a full day, or two, just walking and discovering.
Self-guided tours are a great way to cover the city without spending anything. With maps and resources readily available online, you can put together your own itinerary and move at whatever pace suits you, stopping for as long as you like at each spot. Several free audio tour apps cover the city’s most historic neighborhoods and let you hear the stories behind the buildings without having to follow a guide on someone else’s schedule.
Garden District Tour
The Garden District is a feast for the eyes, with its iconic historic mansions and well-tended gardens lining shaded streets. Walking through the neighborhood feels like stepping back into a different era, and the scale of some of these homes is genuinely impressive. Many of them date to the mid-19th century and were built by wealthy American merchants who settled upriver from the Creole population of the French Quarter, giving the district its own distinct architectural identity. Several homes on the streets around Prytania Street have appeared in novels, films, and local legend.
Take your time with the architecture and the beautifully maintained grounds throughout the area. The Garden District isn’t just visually striking; it’s also a good place to slow down and get a feel for the residential side of New Orleans, which is easy to miss if you spend your whole visit in the French Quarter.
Self-Guided Tours
For independent travelers, starting a self-guided walk at a popular local spot like Molly’s Rise and Shine in the Garden District is a solid way to orient yourself before heading out. Free maps and audio tours are easy to find online, covering history, architecture, and local culture across the city’s many distinct neighborhoods. Sites like the New Orleans tourism board offer downloadable walking itineraries covering specific themes, from architecture to culinary history, if you want a bit more structure to your day.
One of the best things about a self-guided approach in New Orleans is the freedom it gives you to linger. Find an interesting courtyard, follow the sound of music down a side street, or duck into a corner store on a whim. That kind of wandering is often where the best discoveries happen, and New Orleans is a city that rewards people who aren’t in a rush.
3. Embrace Nature in City Park
City Park is a genuine green oasis in the middle of New Orleans, offering outdoor activities and open space on a scale that surprises a lot of first-time visitors. At roughly 1,300 acres, the park is about 50% larger than Central Park in New York City, and it has the range of activities to match. Birdwatching, fishing, and nature trails are all available within its boundaries, and the park is home to some of the oldest live oak trees in the country, many of which have been standing for centuries. Walking beneath the Spanish moss-draped canopy of those oaks is one of the more quietly spectacular things you can do for free in the entire city and a favorite thing to do of mine when I visit.
Whether you’re relaxing in the lush landscapes, having a family picnic, or exploring the trails, City Park has something for just about everyone. Its size and variety of activities make it an ideal place to spend a slow afternoon, and its location in the middle of the city makes it easy to incorporate into a longer day of sightseeing without much backtracking.
Sculpture Garden
The Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden, located within City Park adjacent to the New Orleans Museum of Art, is free to visit every day of the week. The garden features a diverse collection of contemporary sculptures set within a landscape of pines, magnolias, and live oaks surrounding two lagoons. It’s a genuinely beautiful spot, and the combination of art and natural setting is hard to beat. Walking across one of the overwater bridges and finding yourself at eye level with the lagoon is the kind of experience that sticks with you.
The Sculpture Garden doubled in size in 2019 and now covers eleven acres, showcasing more than 90 works by artists from around the world, including pieces by Louise Bourgeois, Frank Gehry, and Maya Lin. Whether you’re an art enthusiast or just looking for a peaceful walk, it’s worth at least a couple of hours, and the fact that it’s completely free makes it one of the best deals in the city.
Big Lake
Big Lake is a popular destination within City Park, offering a calm, scenic setting for relaxing, picnicking, and fishing. The lake is surrounded by shade and greenery, making it a natural gathering spot for families and locals looking to unwind away from the city noise. On weekends it tends to draw a pleasantly mixed crowd of joggers, families with small kids, couples out for a walk, and older locals who clearly have their favorite bench.
Paddleboat rentals are available for those who want to get out on the water, adding a fun, low-key recreational option alongside the more passive pleasures of sitting by the shore. It’s a good spot to recharge after a busy morning in the French Quarter or the Garden District, and it pairs naturally with a visit to the nearby Sculpture Garden.
4. Cultural Experiences at Museums
New Orleans has a strong museum culture, and many of the city’s institutions offer free admission on specific days or for certain visitors. From the Historic New Orleans Collection to the New Orleans Museum of Art, there are solid options for anyone interested in the city’s history, culture, and art. Free access programs make them accessible to a wide range of visitors, and the quality of what’s on offer here is genuinely high — this isn’t a city that treats its cultural institutions as afterthoughts.
Whether your interest is art, history, or the cultural heritage of Louisiana specifically, the museums here offer real depth. Take advantage of the free days and spend some time with the stories and artifacts that have shaped this unusual city. A few hours inside one of these institutions will give you a much richer understanding of what you’re seeing out on the streets.
Historic New Orleans Collection
The Historic New Orleans Collection is a standout cultural institution for anyone curious about the city’s past. Founded by General and Mrs. L. Kemper Williams, the collection features immersive films and rotating exhibits that bring the city’s history vividly to life, with a particular focus on the colonial, antebellum, and post-Civil War periods that shaped the city’s unique cultural mix. Free timed-entry tickets are available online, making it easy to plan a visit without any hassle.
The collection functions as both a museum and a research center, and the public exhibits are informative without feeling like a history lecture. From colonial-era maps and artifacts to photography and oral histories from more recent decades, it covers New Orleans with real depth. If you find yourself wanting to understand why New Orleans feels so unlike any other American city, this is probably the best place to start.
New Orleans Museum of Art
NOMA, as it’s commonly known, offers free general admission to anyone 19 and under. The museum holds an extensive collection spanning several centuries and many styles, with particular strengths in African art, French and American decorative arts, and photography. It’s genuinely world-class for a city of New Orleans’ size, and the building itself, set at the end of a long formal allée in City Park, is worth seeing from the outside alone.
The Besthoff Sculpture Garden adjacent to the museum is free every day and well worth visiting on its own, even if you don’t go inside the museum itself. Check the NOMA website before your trip for current admission details, hours, and any special exhibitions on during your visit, as the programming changes regularly and there’s often something interesting beyond the permanent collection.
5. Music and Festivals
New Orleans lives and breathes music, and the city has an impressive lineup of free live performances and festivals throughout the year. From spontaneous street music in the French Quarter to organized events like the French Quarter Festival, there’s almost always something happening. Jazz, blues, brass bands, funk — you’ll encounter all of it just by walking around, and often all in the same evening. The city has an unusually deep bench of local musicians, which means even the free performances tend to be genuinely good rather than just background noise.
The city also hosts a steady stream of art markets, outdoor concerts, and neighborhood festivals that are free to attend. These events are a great window into local life and the community culture that makes New Orleans so different from other cities. Checking what’s on before you arrive can help you time your visit around a specific event, but even if you show up with no plan, you’re unlikely to go a full day without stumbling into something worth watching.
Free Concerts
Lafayette Square hosts Wednesday at the Square, a beloved free outdoor concert series run by the Young Leadership Council. Held on Wednesday evenings from late March through early May, the series features a rotating lineup of local artists playing everything from jazz and funk to swamp pop and Latin rhythms. The concerts run from 5 to 8 p.m. each week, with live music until 7:30, and food and drink vendors set up around the square throughout the evening.
The concerts draw over 4,500 people each week and have been recognized by USA Today as one of the 10 Best Outdoor Concert Series in the country. The vibe is relaxed and community-driven, with a crowd that ranges from young professionals to longtime locals who have been coming for years. If you happen to be in New Orleans on a Wednesday evening during the spring, it’s one of the better free evenings the city has to offer.
Free Festivals
New Orleans has a well-earned reputation for its festivals, and many of them are completely free. The French Quarter Festival, held each April, is one of the largest, spreading local music across multiple outdoor stages alongside food vendors and art from around the city. It regularly draws hundreds of thousands of visitors and is considered one of the biggest free music festivals in the American South.
Other notable free events include the Oak Street Po-Boy Festival each November, which pairs local food vendors with live music in one of the city’s most beloved neighborhood streets, and the Crescent City Blues and BBQ Festival in October. The Satchmo SummerFest, held in early August around Louis Armstrong‘s birthday, honors his legacy with free concerts, panel discussions, and a jazz mass at the New Orleans Jazz Museum. It’s one of the more intimate free festivals the city puts on and well worth planning around if you’re a jazz fan.
6. Scenic Spots Along the Mississippi River
The mighty Mississippi River runs right alongside New Orleans, and the riverfront offers some of the best free time the city has to offer. Biking, walking, or just sitting and watching the ships and barges pass by are all perfectly valid ways to spend an afternoon without spending any money. The river here is wide and powerful and genuinely impressive up close, especially if you’re not used to seeing a working river of this scale. You get a real sense of how much commerce and history has moved through this stretch of water over the centuries.
Among the best spots for river views are Woldenberg Riverfront Park and Crescent Park. Both offer walking paths, open green space, and some of the most relaxed outdoor settings the city has to offer, and together they give you a good stretch of the riverfront to explore at your own pace.
Woldenberg Riverfront Park
Woldenberg Riverfront Park is a favorite among families and outdoor enthusiasts, with wide bricked walkways and open lawns running right along the river. It’s a good spot for biking, picnicking, and catching street performances, all with views of the water and passing barge traffic. The park sits at the edge of the French Quarter, which makes it an easy and pleasant addition to a morning or afternoon spent in that part of the city. It also serves as the main venue for the French Quarter Festival each April, when it transforms into one of the best free outdoor concert settings anywhere in the country.
Even on a regular day with no festival in sight, the park draws a lively mix of locals and visitors. The combination of open space and riverside scenery makes it one of the more pleasant places to spend an afternoon anywhere in the city, and the unobstructed views of the river looking toward the Crescent City Connection bridge are genuinely striking at dusk.
Crescent Park
Crescent Park offers some of the best views of the New Orleans skyline and the Mississippi River, and it connects several neighborhoods along the east bank, including Bywater. The park was built on former industrial land and the design does a good job of incorporating the bones of the old wharf structures into something that feels intentional and interesting rather than just a cleared-out lot. There’s a long riverfront promenade, a couple of striking entry arches, and plenty of open space to spread out.
It’s a quieter option than Woldenberg, and the walking paths along the river make for a genuinely peaceful stroll with some of the best unobstructed river views in the city. If you’re staying in or near the Marigny or Bywater neighborhoods, Crescent Park is an easy walk from almost anywhere in that part of the city and well worth an early morning visit before the day heats up.
7. Unique Neighborhoods and Streets
New Orleans is a city of neighborhoods, and each one has its own distinct character that rewards exploration. From the historic homes of the Garden District to the locally owned shops and cafes of Magazine Street, there’s a lot to discover simply by walking around and paying attention. The city has a long tradition of neighborhood identity, and locals tend to be genuinely proud of the part of town they’re from, which means you’ll often get better recommendations by asking someone where they live than by asking what’s worth seeing downtown.
A few streets in particular stand out for window shopping, gallery hopping, and getting a feel for daily life here. Royal Street and Magazine Street are both well worth an afternoon, and Algiers Point, just across the river, is a quieter hidden gem that many visitors never make it to. None of these require spending any money to enjoy, which makes them perfect fillers between paid activities or solid destinations in their own right.
Magazine Street
Magazine Street stretches from Canal Street all the way to Audubon Park, covering about six miles of locally owned shops, restaurants, and bars. You can browse vintage clothing, pick up handmade jewelry, grab a coffee, and find a bookshop all within a few blocks. And the street changes character noticeably as you move uptown, shifting from slightly gritty and eclectic near the lower end to more polished and boutique-heavy near Audubon. The variety is a big part of what makes it so enjoyable to walk.
Whether you’re seriously shopping or just wandering, Magazine Street has a lively and welcoming atmosphere that doesn’t feel staged for tourists. It’s one of the better streets in the city for getting a sense of how folks in New Orleans actually lives, and it’s a reliable spot to spend a few hours without any particular agenda and still come away feeling like you’ve seen something real.
Algiers Point
Algiers Point is a charming historic neighborhood on the west bank of the Mississippi, accessible via the free Canal Street Ferry from the foot of Canal Street. The ferry ride itself takes about ten minutes and offers some of the best views you’ll get of the downtown New Orleans skyline from the water — worth the trip for that alone. Once across, you’ll find quiet streets lined with historic Creole cottages and shotgun houses, a relaxed pace of life, and a handful of local pubs and small art galleries.
It’s a neighborhood that feels genuinely different from the rest of the city, which is a big part of its appeal. Most tourists don’t make the trip, which means it retains a local character that’s harder to find in the busier parts of New Orleans. The ferry runs throughout the day and the round trip is free, making it one of the more rewarding and underrated ways to spend a couple of hours in the city.
8. Above Ground Cemeteries
New Orleans is famous for its above-ground cemeteries, a burial practice shaped by the city’s high water table and recurring history of flooding, which made traditional in-ground burials impractical for much of the city’s past. These sites, with their elaborate marble tombs and brick-and-plaster mausoleums stacked closely together, are often called “Cities of the Dead,” and they’re unlike anything you’ll find in most other American cities. Walking through one is a genuinely memorable experience, somewhere between a history tour and a meditation on how a city relates to its dead.
Lafayette Cemetery No. 1
Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 sits inside the Garden District and draws visitors both for its historical significance and for its appearances in various films and television shows over the years, including adaptations of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, which were famously set in New Orleans. The above-ground tombs here are beautifully maintained, many of them shaded by old trees that have grown up between the rows, and the grounds have a peaceful, slightly overgrown quality that gives the place real atmosphere.
Unlike St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, Lafayette Cemetery can be visited independently without a guided tour, making it a more flexible free stop. It pairs naturally with a Garden District walking tour and is easy to combine with a stroll along Magazine Street just a few blocks away. (Note: the cemetery has been closed since September 2019 for restoration and repairs. No reopen date has been given).
9. Family-Friendly Activities
New Orleans has plenty of free and low-cost options for families traveling with kids.
Audubon Park
Audubon Park is a beautiful green space in the Uptown neighborhood, situated between Tulane University and Loyola University on one side and the Mississippi River on the other. The park features playgrounds, a popular 1.8-mile jogging and walking loop, and a lagoon area that draws turtles, herons, and plenty of ducks, making it genuinely interesting for kids who are into wildlife. The grounds are well maintained and spacious enough that it rarely feels crowded, even on busy weekends.
It’s also worth noting that the park borders the Audubon Zoo, so if you’re willing to budget for one paid attraction, the zoo is an easy extension of a free morning in the park. On its own, though, Audubon Park is a reliable and pleasant free option for an afternoon outdoors, especially in the cooler months when the weather makes walking genuinely enjoyable.
Summary
New Orleans is the kind of city that can keep you busy for days without ever requiring you to open your wallet in a serious way. From the music and history of the French Quarter to the open green spaces of City Park and the scenic banks of the Mississippi River, the city offers an unusually rich mix of free experiences that hold up against the paid attractions in most other cities. The festivals, the neighborhoods, the cemeteries, and the street performances all add up to something genuinely hard to find anywhere else in the country.
Whether you end up at a free concert in Lafayette Square, wandering the antique shops on Royal Street, or taking a ferry ride to Algiers Point just for the views of the skyline from the water, the nine options on this list are a solid place to start. Pack comfortable walking shoes, give yourself more time than you think you need, and don’t be too attached to a schedule. New Orleans rewards the people who let it unfold at its own pace. It ain’t called The Big Easy for nothing.
If you like New Orleans, check out these other Locations you’ll love:
- Best Things To Do In Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
- Best Things To Do In Treasure Island, Florida
- Best Things To Do In Carlsbad, California
- Best Things To Do In Erie, Pennsylvania
- Best Things To Do In Buffalo, New York
- Best Things To Do In Cocoa Beach, Florida
- Best Things To Do In Bozeman, Montana
- Best Free Things To Do In Cincinnati, Ohio
- Best Free Things To Do In San Diego, California
- Best Free Things To Do In San Antonio, Texas
- Best Free Things To Do In Houston, Texas
- Best Free Things To Do In Naples, Florida
- Best Free Things to Do In Washington, D.C.
- Best Free Things To Do In St. Louis, Missouri
- Best Affordable Things To Do In Panama City Beach, Florida
“How boring would the world be if everywhere and everyone were the same. Safe travels and good adventures.” Scuba Jay
