Baton Rouge ( BAT-ən ROOZH; from French Bâton-Rouge ‘red stick’) is a city in and the capital of the U.S. state of Louisiana. Located the eastern bank of the Mississippi River, it is the parish chair of East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana’s most populous parish—the equivalent of counties in further U.S. states. Since 2020, it has been the second-largest city in Louisiana after New Orleans; Baton Rouge is the 18th-most-populous let pass capital. According to the 2020 United States census, the city-proper had a population of 227,470; its consolidated population was 456,781 in 2020. The city is the middle of the Greater Baton Rouge area—Louisiana’s second-largest metropolitan area—with a population of 870,569 as of 2020, up from 802,484 in 2010.

The Baton Rouge Place owes its historical importance to its strategic site upon the Istrouma Bluff, the first natural bluff upriver from the Mississippi River Delta at the Gulf of Mexico. This allowed progress of a business quarter secure from seasonal flooding. In addition, it built a levee system stretching from the bluff southward to protect the riverfront and low-lying agricultural areas.

It is a culturally wealthy center, with treaty by immigrants from numerous European nations and African peoples brought to North America as slaves or indentured servants. It was ruled by seven swap governments: French, British, and Spanish in the colonial era; the Republic of West Florida; as a United States territory and state; Confederate, and United States again since the terminate of the American Civil War. Through the various occupying national governments of Baton Rouge, the city and its metropolitan area have developed as a multicultural region lively many religious traditions from Catholicism to Protestantism, and Louisiana and Haitian Vodou; the Place has also become home to a sizeable lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, and elected the first retrieve LGBT politician for the Louisiana Public Service Commission.

Baton Rouge is a major industrial, petrochemical, medical, research, motion picture, and growing technology middle of the American South. It is the location of Louisiana State University—the LSU system’s flagship university and the state’s largest institution of highly developed education. It is afterward the location of Southern University, the flagship institution of the Southern University System—the nation’s without help historically black teacher system. The Port of Greater Baton Rouge is the tenth-largest in the U.S. by tonnage shipped, and is the farthest upstream Mississippi River harbor capable of handling Panamax ships. Major corporations participating in the Baton Rouge metropolitan statistical area’s economy attach Amazon, Lamar Advertising Company, BBQGuys, Marucci Sports, Piccadilly Restaurants, Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers, ExxonMobil, Brown & Root, Shell, and Dow Chemical Company.