New Orleans

Don’t be shocked at the sad fate of the Big Easy. Our history is littered with ‘eternal’ cities brought down by flood, pestilence or man-made disaster, says Felipe Fernández-Armesto

THE SURPRISING THING about New Orleans is not that the city should have been engulfed, but that it took so long for it to happen. Cities do not last. Those built in precarious places collapse. The rest are doomed to decay or suffer humanly induced destruction. It is only our historical myopia, which prevents most of us from seeing much of the past at once, that makes us think our cities are solid or enduring...more here