Tuileries Garden

The Tuileries Garden stretches between the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde, 25.5 hectares of gravel walks, rows of trees, basins and statues laid out on the grand axis that Le Nôtre meant to carry on westward towards what became the Champs-Élysées. It takes its name from the tile works, tuileries, that stood here before Catherine de' Medici bought the land in 1564 to build a new palace and commissioned a Florentine, Bernard de Carnesse, to lay out an Italian Renaissance garden beside it.

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. In 1667, at the urging of Charles Perrault, author of Sleeping Beauty, the Tuileries became the first royal garden opened to the public. The palace itself did not survive: set on fire during the Paris Commune, its ruins were cleared in 1883, leaving the garden to flow into the Place du Carrousel.

It is also one of Paris's great open-air sculpture galleries. Copies of Coysevox's winged horses, brought from Marly in 1719, guard the Concorde gate; statues of the seasons and of Roman heroes ring the Octagonal Basin; André Malraux placed Aristide Maillol's bronze women in the Carrousel in the 1960s; and since the late 1990s works by Rodin, Henry Moore, Germaine Richier, Jean Dubuffet, Louise Bourgeois, Roy Lichtenstein and Giuseppe Penone have been added. On the western terraces stand two museums: the Orangerie, where eight of Monet's great Water Lilies panels were installed in 1927, and the Jeu de Paume, a former royal tennis court. Children still sail small boats on the basins, and in 2024 the Olympic cauldron, a ring of fire beneath a balloon, rose each evening from the Grand Bassin Rond.

Getting there

The garden lies in the 1st arrondissement, on the right bank of the Seine, with the Louvre at its eastern end and the Place de la Concorde at its western end. Paris-Orly Airport (ORY) is about 15 km away in a straight line.