From smugglers to seafood docks
Native Americans lived in the Barataria region long before any map was drawn, and their shell middens and ceremonial mounds still sit along the bayous. The French charted Barataria Bay as a harbor for big ships soon after New Orleans was founded in 1718. According to the Town of Jean Lafitte, the name first shows up on French maps in 1729 and means dishonesty at sea, which turned out to be good forecasting.
In 1808 the brothers Jean and Pierre Lafitte set up a base for smugglers and privateers on Grand Terre, the barrier island at the mouth of the bay. They used old shell middens as storehouses and sold their goods to New Orleans merchants and planters. In the War of 1812 the brothers threw in with Andrew Jackson to defend the city and were pardoned for it. The town that carries Jean's name grew up along the bayou behind his old hideout.
Fishing came later and stayed. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, bayou families harvested shrimp, crabs, oysters and fish, logged cypress, gathered moss for mattress stuffing and trapped mink, muskrat and alligator. The early French and Spanish settlers were joined by Croatians, then by Filipino and Chinese families. Several thousand people live along Bayou Barataria today, and the town names seafood, oil and gas as what keeps it running.
Fishing the Barataria Basin
The town calls itself a paradise for inland saltwater fishing, and the target list is short and good: redfish, speckled trout, drum and flounder. Most visitors book a guide out of the marinas on Jean Lafitte Boulevard or out at Barataria on Privateer Boulevard. The public pier at the end of Highway 45 was still closed from Hurricane Ida damage when we checked.
The town also lists several seafood dealers in Lafitte, and that is where the crabs and shrimp for a backyard boil or a pan of stuffed crabs come from. For a walk after lunch, the Wetland Trace is a boardwalk through a 41 acre cypress swamp beside the national park. The park's own Barataria Preserve covers 26,000 acres of bayou, swamp, marsh and forest, but most of its trails closed on February 2, 2026 for about two years of Ida repairs, so rangers now meet visitors on the Wetland Trace instead.
