Parc des Buttes-Chaumont

Interesting facts

The Gibbet of Montfaucon stood on the site from the 13th century until 1760, so executions were part of this landscape for roughly five hundred years.

About 1,000 labourers built the park, and some 200,000 cubic metres of topsoil were brought in by rail to cover the barren quarry ground.

The 20-metre waterfall inside the grotto is entirely artificial, fed by water pumped up from the Canal de l'Ourcq.

The Eocene fossils turned up by the quarrymen were studied by Georges Cuvier, one of the founders of palaeontology.

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.

Behind the park's looping landscape lie about 5.5 kilometres of carriage roads and 2.2 kilometres of footpaths.

Its two Guignol puppet theatres have been entertaining children since 1892, part of a Parisian tradition of open-air puppet shows in parks.

In Jean Grémillon's 1937 film Gueule d'amour, Jean Gabin and Mireille Balin stroll through the park and cross its suspension bridge.

Gabriel Davioud, who designed the park's temple, cafés and gatehouses, also designed the town hall of the 19th arrondissement facing its main entrance.

Among the park's pavilions, the Rosa Bonheur has run since 2008 as a modern guinguette, reviving the old Parisian tradition of open-air dance cafés.

Why it is worth it

Few city parks began life in such a grim place. For some five centuries the bare hill in north-eastern Paris carried the Gibbet of Montfaucon, where the bodies of the executed were left on display; after the Revolution the ground served as a rubbish tip, a knacker's yard for dead horses and a sewage dump, and its gypsum and limestone were quarried until the seams gave out in the late 1850s. The quarrymen also turned up fossils of Eocene mammals such as Palaeotherium. The name itself is usually traced to "Chauve-mont", the bald mount.

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. Rather than smoothing the old quarry away, the designers dramatised it: an artificial lake of about a hectare and a half surrounds the Île du Belvédère, a rock stack rising some 50 metres, crowned by the little round Temple de la Sibylle, modelled on the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli.

What rewards a slow walk is the theatre of it all. A grotto 20 metres high hangs with artificial stalactites up to eight metres long and has its own waterfall; a stairway of 173 steps threads through the rock down to the water's edge; a suspension bridge of 63 metres, attributed to Gustave Eiffel, and a high masonry bridge 22 metres above the lake link the island to the shore. Cedars of Lebanon planted in 1880, a giant sequoia and a ginkgo stand on the slopes and from the temple the view opens over the rooftops of the 19th arrondissement. It covers almost 25 hectares, the fifth-largest park in Paris, yet feels like a picturesque mountain landscape folded into a working-class quarter.

Getting there

The park lies in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, a few hundred metres from the centre of the Buttes-Chaumont district. Paris-Orly Airport (ORY) is about 17 km away. Métro line 7bis stops at Buttes Chaumont and Botzaris, right at the park gates, and line 5 at Laumière. There are five main entrances and several smaller gates.

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Parc des Buttes-Chaumont

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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