Today Travel + Leisure magazine announced its 2010 list of the World’s Best Awards. The most exciting addition to this year’s top ten list of cities in US and Canada is New Orleans.

New Orleans has always been a popular travel destination. It’s French-inspired culture makes it a unique place to visit. The city has earned a reputation for beautiful women, free flowing drinks, voodoo, and long, crazy nights. Whether you see this reputation as awesome or notorious, the fact remains that a huge number of people have been visiting New Orleans for decades specifically because of these traits.

All of that changed in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina devastated the city.

Despite New Orleans’s beautiful environment and fun-loving culture, it’s an incredibly impractical place to put a city.

New Orleans was a waterlogged area well before Hurricane Katrina. The city is literally sinking. It’s protective marshes are disappearing. The coast threatens to consume every gorgeous building in the French Quarter within decades.

There were a lot of arguments following Katrina about whether people should even bother rebuilding New Orleans. I often sided with those who favored abandonment. My concern has always been that continued environmental destruction will inevitably lead to another event just as deadly as Hurricane Katrina. Rebuilding the city didn’t mean much to me if it was just going to be  knocked down again.

My argument lost and people started rebuilding on the swampy land. Now it seems that rebuilding was the right idea, at least of the time being, because people are returning to New Orleans and loving it more than ever. Previous Travel + Leisure lists ranked New Orleans as the 10th best city in the US and Canada. This year it is ranked as the 7th.

That’s good news for me. I’ll be spending most of next week in New Orleans. That’s something I never thought I’d do after Hurricane Katrina. Apparently the city still has plenty of allure.

You can check out the rest of the World’s Best Awards at the Travel + Leisure website. Print versions of the magazine hit newsstands on July 23.

(Image via: Sigmobile)