Avery Island, Louisiana

The birthplace of TABASCO® brand pepper sauce, Avery Island has been owned for over 180 years by the interrelated Marsh, Avery and McIlhenny families. Lush subtropical flora and venerable live oaks draped with wild muscadine and swags of barbe espagnole, or Spanish moss, cover this geological oddity, which is one of five "islands" rising above south Louisiana’s flat coastal marshes.

The island occupies roughly 2,200 acres and sits atop a deposit of solid rock salt thought to be deeper than Mount Everest is high. Geologists believe this deposit is the remnant of a buried ancient seabed, pushed to the surface by the sheer weight of surrounding alluvial sediments.

Today, Avery Island remains the home of the TABASCO® brand pepper sauce factory, as well as Jungle Gardens and its Bird City wildfowl refuge. The Tabasco factory and the gardens are open to the public.

In the 1890s, just before taking over as president of Tabasco from his father, E.A. "Mr. Ned" McIlhenny started this refuge in an effort to save the snowy egrets. From just eight of the birds, that had been hunted for their plumes to near extinction, the colony has thrived and now thousands of birds migrate here every spring.

Видео Avery Island, Louisiana канала Wally Towne