Old Ursuline Convent

Old Ursuline Convent tickets: which one to buy

A modest ticket covers the convent museum, the adjoining St Mary's Church and the formal garden; audio guides are included and guided tours run at set times for a small supplement. The site is on Chartres Street at the quiet end of the French Quarter, five minutes from Jackson Square, so there is no transport cost. Walking tours of the Quarter include the convent and cost several times the entry, usually adding the cathedral and the Cabildo.

The archdiocese runs the museum and the staff are volunteers, which makes the tours informal and the opening hours less predictable than a state museum; check the day before. Combined tickets with other Catholic sites in the city are not sold. Numbers are small and booking is unnecessary outside Mardi Gras. The museum shop sells a good history of the nuns in Louisiana, which covers the casket girls and the convent's role in the city's education.

Visiting Old Ursuline Convent: what to see

Twelve Ursuline nuns arrived from Rouen in 1727 to run a hospital and school in a French colonial outpost of a few thousand people, and the building they eventually occupied, finished in 1752, is the oldest structure in the Mississippi valley and the only French colonial building left in New Orleans. It survived the fires of 1788 and 1794 that destroyed most of the Quarter. The nuns educated the daughters of colonists, free women of colour and enslaved women, which was unusual anywhere in the eighteenth-century Americas.

Inside are period rooms, a wide cypress staircase salvaged from the earlier convent of 1734, and a collection of religious art and colonial documents. The church next door, added in 1845, holds a statue of Our Lady of Prompt Succour, credited locally with saving the city from the fire of 1812 and from the British in 1815. The formal garden between the convent and the church is planted as it was in the eighteenth century, with herbs and citrus in boxes.

Old Ursuline Convent opening hours and the best time to go

Open on most weekdays and Saturday mornings, with hours that shift and closures on major holidays; the museum is run on a small budget and it pays to telephone. New Orleans is hot and humid from May to September and the interiors are air-conditioned. Mardi Gras and the jazz festival fill the Quarter, and the convent is one of the few quiet places in it at those times.

The garden is small and formal and is included. Photography is allowed. Dress is informal. Allow an hour. The French Market is two minutes away and the cathedral on Jackson Square five, which makes this the natural end of a walk along Chartres Street. Chartres Street is quieter than Royal or Bourbon and the walk from Jackson Square passes several of the oldest houses in the Quarter.