Palais Garnier

Garnier's opera house sits on ground that fought him from day one. When excavation began in 1861, the site turned out to be waterlogged — wells and steam pumps running around the clock couldn't hold back the groundwater long enough to lay foundations. Rather than lose the fight, Garnier built with it: he sealed a watertight concrete tank roughly 25 by 50 metres directly under the building to absorb and redistribute the pressure, in effect giving the opera house a swimming pool for a basement, five storeys down, that exists purely to hold back water that would otherwise flood the stage machinery above.

That tank is almost certainly where Gaston Leroux got the idea for the underground lake in "The Phantom of the Opera" — he knew the building and its rumours well, and the image of a hidden lake beneath the auditorium was too good a detail for a novelist to pass up, even if his phantom's gothic hideaway is considerably more romantic than a fire-suppression cistern. The building earned the legend honestly in other ways too: it holds roughly six miles of underground passages, thousands of doors and locks, and narrow service stairs that climb from the fifth basement all the way to the flies above the stage — more than enough physical infrastructure to make a hidden resident plausible.

Architecturally, Garnier wasn't chasing restraint. The facade layers late Italian Baroque motifs with dense, almost obsessive carving, and it set the template that opera houses across Europe borrowed from for the rest of the century. Inside, the Grand Foyer was built to be seen in as much as to see from — mirrored, gilded, and designed so that Second Empire Paris could parade through it at intermission. A century later Marc Chagall added a new painted ceiling to the auditorium in 1964, a modernist intrusion into Garnier's design that was controversial then and is now treated as inseparable from the building.

Getting there

Located in Paris 09 Opéra. Paris-Orly Airport (ORY) is about 16 km away.