We’ve long said Natchez has a special atmosphere about our community that outsiders quickly spot, but that locals can take for granted over time.

To co-opt a phrase from the film, “A Field of Dreams,” if you bring them to Natchez, they’ll fall in love.

The magic of our area is widely known to first-time visitors, but easy for us to overlook.

We drive past American history in the form of enormous mansions everyday without batting an eye.

We stroll down beautiful streets laid out by the Spanish more than 200 years ago.

We look out over the majestic Mississippi River with the same awe that early French settlers had and before them the Natchez Indians.

The mysterious lure of Natchez seems to have proven true again after a Louisiana travel writer came to Natchez last year.

The result was quite an elaborate travel piece published in the Shreveport Times newspaper and online at the newspaper’s parent company’s website, USA Today.

Tourism officials, obviously, are ecstatic about the free publicity.

But they shouldn’t be surprised.

We live in a unique and beautiful part of the world and we should never forget that.