Lake Charles, Louisiana

Current Weather

The city of Lake Charles is located in Calcasieu Parish and is the county seat.

Typical abbreviation for Lake Charles: Lk. Charles

Lake Charles is near sea level^<1>.

Time Zone: Lake Charles lies in the Central Time Zone (CST/CDT) and observes daylight saving time.

Florida, New York and Ontario have communities that are also named Lake Charles.

At the time of the 2000 Census, Lake Charles had a population of 71,757 people^<2> (or 39.1% of the total population of Calcasieu Parish). The population of Lake Charles represented 1.61% of the total of Louisiana, making it the state's 5th most populous community.

From the Census Estimates for 2008, Lake Charles had a population of 71,061 people. This is a decrease of 0.97% since the 2000 Census.

The following table shows the recent changes in population. For the years after 2000, the population counts are estimated. More information can be found on the Census Page for Lake Charles.

The following is a sample of nearby communities:

	Community	Direction	Distance<3>	2008 Population	Change Since 2000
	Bell City	E	16 mi [25.75 km]	---
	Carlyss	W	9 mi [14.48 km]	---
	DeQuincy	NW	21 mi [33.8 km]	3,224	5.12% decrease
	Fenton	NE	20 mi [32.19 km]	374	1.58% decrease
	Hackberry	SW	16 mi [25.75 km]	---
	Iowa	E	12 mi [19.31 km]	2,620	1.61% decrease

To learn more about neighboring communities, please visit the Neighborhood Page for Lake Charles.

Websites for Lake Charles

If you know of a local history or genealogy society for either Lake Charles or Calcasieu Parish, would you please send us the URL for their website? We would like to add their link to our Gazetteer. To contact us, please visit our Feedback Page.

The Commemorative Quarter for Louisiana<4>

Search for Local Businesses

People have found Google's 'Search-by-Location' to be a useful tool when planning visits to this area. We have prepared the following searches to help you find businesses, travel and vacation activities that are in (or close to) Lake Charles. It's likely that the search results won't include all of the businesses that are in this area, but the results should give you a good foundation for further searches.

For what it's worth: In addition to helping you submit your own search, clicking 'Other...' will frequently (but not always) show you some popular searches for this area.

If you find an error or your business wasn't included in the results, please contact Google to help them resolve the issue (we simply link to 'Search-by-Location' and have no control over their results).

Other Roadside Stops

Off-the-Road Links

Footnotes