The Most Beautiful Gardens, Parks and Forests in France
11 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful gardens, parks and forests in France are Tuileries Garden, Jardin du Luxembourg and Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. The list covers 11 gardens, parks and forests. Last updated 14 October 2026.
France gave the world the formal garden. In the seventeenth century André Le Nôtre turned the grounds of Versailles into an exercise in geometry and perspective, and the jardin à la française, with its axes, parterres and long reflecting water, was copied by courts across Europe. The country's later gardens moved in other directions, from Romantic city parks to painters' flower gardens, while its Mediterranean coast keeps some of the wildest shoreline in the region.
The Gardens of Versailles remain the model: avenues, fountains and the Grand Canal stretching away from the palace. In Paris the Jardin du Luxembourg was laid out for Marie de' Medici in the seventeenth century, and the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, opened under Napoleon III, turned a former quarry into cliffs, a lake and a small temple on a rocky island. At Villandry in the Loire Valley, a château is surrounded by Renaissance-style terraces including an ornamental kitchen garden.
On the Riviera, Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild spreads a series of themed gardens along a narrow ridge above the sea, and at Giverny Claude Monet created the water lily pond and Japanese bridge he painted for decades. In the Dordogne, the gardens of Marqueyssac wind clipped boxwood along a cliff high above the river. Nature appears too: the limestone inlets of the Calanques near Marseille, the red volcanic cliffs of Scandola in Corsica, and the Allouville oak in Normandy, an ancient tree with two small chapels built into its trunk.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tuileries Garden | Urban park | |
| 2 | Jardin du Luxembourg | Urban park | |
| 3 | Parc des Buttes-Chaumont | Urban park | |
| 4 | Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild | Historic garden | |
| 5 | Gardens of Versailles | Historic garden | |
| 6 | Scandola Nature Reserve | Nature reserve | ✓ |
| 7 | Calanques National Park | Protected area | |
| 8 | Monet's House and Gardens, Giverny | Historic garden | |
| 9 | Château de Villandry | Historic garden | |
| 10 | Chêne d'Allouville | Remarkable tree | |
| 11 | Gardens of Marqueyssac | Historic garden |
01 Tuileries Garden
Jardin des Tuileries
France · 2.1 km from Paris48.864° N 2.326° E
Agence Rol · Public domain The garden you walk through today is essentially André Le Nôtre's. In 1664 Colbert asked the future designer of Versailles, whose grandfather and father had both been gardeners here, to redesign it, and he imposed the French formal style: a terrace looking down on parterres, a long central alley, two basins, and at the western end two horseshoe ramps rising to terraces around the great Octagonal Basin.
02 Jardin du Luxembourg
France · 1.7 km from Paris48.847° N 2.337° E
Image by liudanao1991 from Pixabay Its centre is a formal French composition: terraces, gravel walks and flower beds around the octagonal Grand Bassin, where model sailboats are still sailed. Around the terraces stand twenty statues of queens of France and illustrious women, commissioned under Louis Philippe in 1848, and more than a hundred statues, monuments and fountains in all. Among them is an original small version of the Statue of Liberty by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi.
Did you know? The garden's orangery shelters about 180 plants in tubs, some of them estimated to be 250 to 300 years old.
03 Parc des Buttes-Chaumont
France · 3.3 km from Paris48.880° N 2.383° E
Heidi Meudt · CC BY 4.0 Under Napoleon III and Haussmann this wasteland became the showpiece of the new Paris. Adolphe Alphand planned the park, Gabriel Davioud designed its buildings and Jean-Pierre Barillet-Deschamps the planting; two years went on earthworks alone, and the park opened on 1 April 1867, in time for the Universal Exposition.
Did you know? The suspension bridge to the island is 63 metres long but hangs only about eight metres above the lake, unlike the far loftier masonry bridge.
04 Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild
France · 5.7 km from Nice43.697° N 7.328° E
Berthold Werner · CC BY-SA 3.0 The gardens were laid out between 1905 and 1912 under the landscape architect Achille Duchêne, and they were conceived as a ship. Seen from the loggia, which served as its bridge, the long garden runs down the spine of the headland like a deck, with water visible on every side; the idea is said to have come from a voyage on the liner Île de France, and the thirty gardeners wore sailors' outfits with red pom-pom berets.
Did you know? Among the furnishings is a whist table that once belonged to Queen Marie-Antoinette.
05 Gardens of Versailles
Jardin de Versailles
France · 2 km from Versailles48.808° N 2.108° E
Julian Lupyan · Public domain The central axis tells the Sun King's story in mythological code. Below the palace terrace, the Latona Fountain shows the mother of Apollo and Diana turning the Lycian peasants who insulted her into frogs, often read as a warning to the nobles of the Fronde. 5 km, 62 metres wide, where the court once went boating in gondolas sent by the Doge of Venice.
Did you know? The Enceladus fountain, showing a giant crushed beneath rocks, throws the tallest jet in the gardens, about 25 metres high.
06 Scandola Nature Reserve
France42.357° N 8.567° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by jackmac34 from Pixabay The reserve was created in 1975 and was among the first in France to protect both land and sea together. It covers a little under 20 square kilometres, roughly half of it marine, with a strictly protected core at its north-western tip. Its value for scientists lies partly underwater: calcareous algae build pale ledges along the waterline, and deeper down coral formations and seagrass meadows shelter a wealth of fish and invertebrates.
Did you know? Scuba diving and recreational fishing are banned throughout its waters, and only regulated professional fishing is permitted.
07 Calanques National Park
Parc national des Calanques
France · 11.1 km from Marseille43.209° N 5.449° E
kallerna · CC BY-SA 4.0 The national park was created by decree in April 2012, and it is unusual in reaching right up to the edge of a large city. It covers about 520 square kilometres, of which only around 85 are on land; the rest is sea, including the islands of the Riou archipelago.
Did you know? About 8,000 years ago Riou was still a peninsula joined to the mainland; rising seas cut it off around the Bronze Age.
08 Monet's House and Gardens, Giverny
Fondation Claude-Monet
France49.075° N 1.536° E
Image by Nadrog from Pixabay The second garden lies across the old railway line and the road. In 1893 Monet bought a marshy plot crossed by a diverted arm of the Epte and, after a fight with neighbours who feared his exotic plants would poison their water, received permission to dig a pond "for the pleasure of the eyes and in order to have subjects to paint".
Did you know? A Japanese gardener, believed to be Wasuke Hata, advised Monet on the garden in 1891.
09 Château de Villandry
France · 14.7 km from Tours47.341° N 0.514° E
Image by rauschenberger from Pixabay The château itself was built around 1536 by Jean Le Breton, a finance minister of King Francis I, who replaced an older fortress but kept its fourteenth-century keep; tradition places a peace meeting between Philip Augustus and Richard the Lionheart at the earlier castle. Le Breton's heirs held the estate for more than two centuries; after the Revolution Napoleon gave it to his brother Jérôme.
Did you know? Some 324 standard roses in 21 varieties rise above the vegetable beds, adding height and colour to the patterns.
10 Chêne d'Allouville
France · 34.6 km from Rouen49.596° N 0.676° E
Giogo · CC BY-SA 4.0 The chapels date from 1696, when the parish priest, the Abbé Jacques Delalande du Détroit, placed an image of the Virgin in a fissure of the trunk and then had the hollow fitted out. The lower room is dedicated to Notre-Dame de la Paix, Our Lady of Peace, and holds a small altar; above it sits a narrow cell known as the Hermit's Chamber.
Did you know? According to tradition, William the Conqueror stopped before this oak in 1066 on his way to the conquest of England.
11 Gardens of Marqueyssac
Jardins de Marqueyssac
France44.824° N 1.163° E
Krzysztof Golik · CC BY-SA 4.0 The house is a late 18th-century country residence with a stone-tiled lauze roof weighing more than 500 tonnes, restored between 2011 and 2017. The gardens owe their character to Julien de Cerval, who returned from Italy after serving from 1849 in the defence of the Papal States and, from 1861, began planting box topped with cypresses and scattered with wild cyclamen, in a manner typical of the Second Empire with a strong Italian accent.
Did you know? During the restoration that began in 1996, new features were added, including an alley of santolina and rosemary and a watercourse running from the belvedere down to a cascade.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful gardens, parks and forests in France?
- On our list, Tuileries Garden ranks first, followed by Jardin du Luxembourg and Parc des Buttes-Chaumont.
- Who designed the Gardens of Versailles?
- The gardens were designed by André Le Nôtre for Louis XIV, beginning in the 1660s. They became the defining example of the French formal garden.
- What is a French formal garden?
- A French formal garden, or jardin à la française, is built on symmetry and a central axis, with clipped hedges, geometric parterres, avenues and ornamental water. It is designed to be seen as a whole from the house or a raised terrace.
- Is there really a chapel inside the Allouville oak?
- Yes. In the seventeenth century two small chapels were built inside the hollow trunk of the Chêne d'Allouville in Normandy, one above the other, reached by a staircase around the tree.
- How many gardens, parks and forests are on this list in France?
- The list covers 11 gardens, parks and forests.