Spanish Town

Spanish Town is the oldest neighborhood in Baton Rouge, commissioned in eighteen oh five by a Spanish colonial official named Carlos de Grand Pré. He laid it out as a settlement for Canary Islanders, Spanish subjects who had come to Louisiana during the colonial period and did not particularly want to be absorbed into the United States after the Louisiana Purchase. The neighborhood they built sits just south of the downtown bluff, a compact grid of streets with buildings spanning from the eighteen twenties to the mid-twentieth century.

The Pino House, built in eighteen twenty-three, is the oldest surviving structure. The neighborhood was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-eight, and its forty-nine acres contain two hundred fifty-eight contributing properties in architectural styles ranging from Greek Revival to Craftsman bungalow.

Spanish Town is perhaps best known today for its Mardi Gras parade, which began in nineteen eighty-one as a small neighborhood celebration and grew into the largest Mardi Gras parade in Baton Rouge. The event's character is deliberately irreverent. The floats carry political satire, targeting local officials, state politicians, and national figures, rendered in terms that range from pointed to extremely blunt. The neighborhood's unofficial mascot is the pink flamingo, adopted as a symbol of the philosophy that poor taste is better than no taste at all.

Every Mardi Gras season, pink flamingo decorations appear around the LSU Lakes nearby. Residents have been known to compete with considerable seriousness over acquiring them. It is a neighborhood that has always known what it thinks, going back to the Canary Islanders who refused to simply become Americans in eighteen oh five.