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In 1984, workers digging foundations for I.M. Pei's glass pyramid hit something unexpected: the walls of a medieval fort...
23/06/2026

In 1984, workers digging foundations for I.M. Pei's glass pyramid hit something unexpected: the walls of a medieval fortress that had been buried for 400 years.

King Philippe Auguste built the Louvre in 1190. Not as a palace. Not as a museum. As a military stronghold, designed to defend Paris from the west — specifically from English forces pressing in from Normandy. It was a square fortress roughly 256 feet (78 meters) by 236 feet (72 meters), ringed by ten towers and a water-filled moat. At its center stood the Grosse Tour (Big Tower), a circular keep nearly 100 feet (30 meters) tall with walls 14 feet (4.25 meters) thick at the base.

For three centuries, the Grosse Tour held the royal treasury, the archives, and the arsenal. In 1527, François I had it demolished. He wanted more light, more space, a Renaissance palace instead of a dark fortress. Workers tore it down to ground level — and then stopped. Nobody bothered to dig out the foundations.

The walls beneath the courtyard stayed there, untouched, for another 450 years.

The excavations ran from 1984 to 1985. Archaeologists uncovered the fortress foundations, the base of the Grosse Tour, sections of the original moats, pottery, weapons, and a parade helmet decorated with fleur-de-lis, identified as belonging to Charles VI, found shattered in pieces at the bottom of the keep well.

Today, visitors can walk directly through the former moats, circling the base of a tower that was demolished before Shakespeare wrote a single play. The medieval section sits in the Sully wing, beneath the same courtyard where the pyramid now stands.

This image is AI-generated. It imagines what it might look like to see the fortress ruins and the pyramid together from above. That vantage point does not exist. The ruins are underground, accessed by staircase inside the museum.

Have you visited the medieval section?

Place de Catalogne was a barren concrete roundabout near Gare Montparnasse until 2022, when Paris decided to rip it out ...
23/06/2026

Place de Catalogne was a barren concrete roundabout near Gare Montparnasse until 2022, when Paris decided to rip it out and plant 478 trees instead.

What was there before? A controversial dark granite fountain called the Creuset du temps (Crucible of Time), designed by Shamai Haber. It was beautiful and strange — engineered to create the optical illusion of water flowing uphill. But it leaked. It stained. It became a maintenance headache. In 2022, the city removed it entirely.

The greening happened fast. By the winter of 2023-24, nearly 500 trees had transformed what used to be a bleak traffic hub into something resembling a micro-forest. The numbers tell the real story: on hot days, the surrounding paved streets reach 40°C (104°F). Inside this green space, temperatures drop to 29°C (84.2°F).

The trees are diverse — oaks, ashes, maples, cherries, a mix of saplings and semi-mature specimens. The space is now car-free for pedestrians and cyclists, and the ground is permeable so rainwater soaks in instead of flooding the streets during storms. A new pathway honors the fountain's creator: Allée Shamaï-Haber.

23/06/2026

Is there a Paris boutique or shop worth going out of your way for?

This is the Fontaine Saint-Michel, on Place Saint-Michel in the 5th arrondissement of Paris. Architect Gabriel Davioud's...
23/06/2026

This is the Fontaine Saint-Michel, on Place Saint-Michel in the 5th arrondissement of Paris. Architect Gabriel Davioud's first plan, drawn up in the mid-1850s, put a fountain dedicated to Peace in the center of the newly enlarged square. City officials rejected that idea and asked him to design something else instead: something large enough to cover up the blank gable wall of the building at the corner of Boulevard Saint-Michel and Rue Saint-André-des-Arts, a wall that Haussmann's new boulevard had left awkwardly exposed.

Davioud's second idea did not go over well either. He proposed putting a statue of Napoleon in the central niche, which set off enough political backlash that he switched again, this time to the Archangel Michael defeating the devil, sculpted by Francisque-Joseph Duret. Construction began in June 1858, and the fountain was inaugurated on August 15, 1860.

The result is the tallest fountain in Paris, 85 feet (26 meters) high and 49 feet (15 meters) wide, built using several different colors of stone and the combined work of nine different sculptors.

What started as a way to hide an ugly wall is now one of the most recognizable meeting points on the Left Bank.

Disclosure: the top image is not a real historical photograph. It's an AI generated reconstruction I made to show what this corner might have looked like before the fountain went up.

This garden sits inside a free museum that most visitors to Paris never set foot in.This is the inner courtyard of the P...
23/06/2026

This garden sits inside a free museum that most visitors to Paris never set foot in.

This is the inner courtyard of the Petit Palais, on Avenue Winston Churchill in the 8th arrondissement, facing the Grand Palais across the street. Architect Charles Girault designed it for the 1900 Exposition Universelle, the same World's Fair that gave Paris the Grand Palais and the Pont Alexandre III. Construction started in 1897, the building was finished by April 1900, and it opened to the public as the City of Paris Museum of Fine Arts in December 1902.

The courtyard is shaped like a half circle, ringed by pink granite columns from the Vosges and a mosaic floor laid by the Italian artist Auguste Labouret's contemporary, Facchina, using small blocks of colored marble. Gold garlands and a pair of blue Sèvres porcelain vases sit above the colonnade. The planting leans tropical: palms, banana trees, magnolias, pampas grass, alongside the cherry blossoms visible in this photo.

Despite housing centuries of paintings and sculpture, from antiquity through the 19th century, the Petit Palais charges no entry fee for its permanent collection, and the garden itself is open to anyone, ticket or not.

It draws under 1.2 million visitors a year, a fraction of what the Louvre or Musée d'Orsay see, which is part of why the courtyard café still feels like a quiet find rather than a tourist stop.

Photo: Laurent Derossi

For roughly 800 years, this was where Paris fed itself. Then, almost overnight, it was gone.This is Les Halles, the cent...
22/06/2026

For roughly 800 years, this was where Paris fed itself. Then, almost overnight, it was gone.

This is Les Halles, the central food market that stood at the heart of Paris from the Middle Ages until 1971. The market grew so large and chaotic that novelist Émile Zola nicknamed it "the belly of Paris." In the 1850s, Napoleon III ordered architect Victor Baltard to rebuild it, reportedly telling him he wanted pavilions made of "iron, iron, nothing but iron." Construction began in 1854: ten glass and cast iron pavilions, each one dedicated to a different type of food, fish, meat, poultry, vegetables.

By the 1960s, the market had outgrown its home. Trucks clogged the surrounding streets day and night, and the wholesale trade moved out to a new site at Rungis, on the southern edge of the city, in 1969. Demolition of Baltard's pavilions started the following year and was finished by 1971, despite petitions, protests, and even a purchase offer from an American banker trying to save them.

Only one pavilion survived. Pavilion number 8, originally built for egg and poultry merchants, was dismantled, moved across the city, and rebuilt in the suburb of Nogent-sur-Marne, where it reopened in 1977 as a cultural space. It is the only piece of Baltard's original market still standing anywhere.

The empty site became a giant pit nicknamed "le trou des Halles," the Halles hole, for most of the 1970s. An underground shopping mall, the Forum des Halles, opened there in 1979. The gold canopy roof seen in the photo today, called La Canopée, is the latest version, completed in 2016 after a redesign by architects Patrick Berger and Jacques Anziutti.

Paris is letting people swim in the Canal Saint-Martin instead of chasing them out of it. Since June 17, a roped-off sec...
22/06/2026

Paris is letting people swim in the Canal Saint-Martin instead of chasing them out of it. Since June 17, a roped-off section of the canal in the Récollets basin, in the 10th arrondissement, has been open for free, supervised swimming during the heat wave. Then yesterday, the same stretch became one of the loudest spots in the city for the Fête de la Musique, with cars banned along the quay from the afternoon through early the next morning.

The swimming zone runs about 330 feet (100 meters) along the quai de Jemmapes, between numbers 116 and 126. Lifeguards watch the water, a floating dock helps people get in and out, and the city tests water quality every morning before deciding whether to open. The point is safety, not encouragement. The canal has steep stone banks, locks, and currents that make swimming on your own genuinely risky, and this is the city's way of channeling that instead of fighting it.

The zone was just extended through July 4, with hours now running from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. on days the heat and water quality allow it. After that, regular supervised swimming returns to the same spot on July 5 as part of the city's summer Paris Plages season. For one Sunday at least, the same quay that had been cooling off swimmers all afternoon was packed with musicians and crowds by nightfall, while Paris sat under its highest heat wave alert of the year.

Artist JR has transformed the Pont Neuf into a walk-through cave — 394 feet (120 meters) long, rising over 56 feet (17 m...
22/06/2026

Artist JR has transformed the Pont Neuf into a walk-through cave — 394 feet (120 meters) long, rising over 56 feet (17 meters) above the Seine. The bridge's stone arches, streetlamps, and parapets have disappeared behind an inflatable rock formation. Inside: darkness, a soundscape designed by Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk, scent, and augmented reality. From the outside, it looks like a prehistoric outcrop has swallowed the bridge whole.

It is free, open 24 hours a day, and closes June 28.

The installation is a tribute to Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who wrapped the same bridge in 450,000 square feet (41,800 square meters) of golden sandstone-colored fabric in September 1985 — also for 14 days, also for free. Three million people came.

If you are in Paris between now and June 28, this is worth a detour.

Despite a heat wave and a citywide alcohol ban, Paris partied straight through the night for this year's Fête de la Musi...
22/06/2026

Despite a heat wave and a citywide alcohol ban, Paris partied straight through the night for this year's Fête de la Musique. By the time the sun rose on Monday morning, crowds were still dancing along the canals, and groups of people were cooling off with an early morning swim.

Held every June 21 since 1982, the Fête de la Musique, which simply means "Music Festival," fills the streets of Paris with free concerts in every style, from jazz to electro. This year's edition went ahead even though temperatures climbed close to 99°F (37°C) and most of France, including Paris, was placed under the country's highest heat alert.

About 5,000 police officers were deployed across the capital, and the ban on drinking alcohol in public was openly ignored by plenty of revelers, and even a few bartenders. Nationwide, some 18,000 concerts still went ahead that night, even though a handful of towns chose to cancel their own celebrations because of the heat.

By the time the music finally died down, the canal banks had become the last stop of the night. Bathers stayed in the water at sunrise, swapping dancing for a dip to bring one of the hottest and longest Fêtes de la Musique in recent memory to a quiet close.

This wall was never supposed to be visible from the street. For decades, it probably wasn't.This is what's known as a mu...
22/06/2026

This wall was never supposed to be visible from the street. For decades, it probably wasn't.

This is what's known as a mur pignon, the triangular gable end of a Paris apartment building, built blind, with no windows, because it was meant to sit flush against the building next door. Builders never bothered finishing party walls like this one with cut stone, since no one was ever meant to see them. Instead they used cheap rubble masonry, the rough, uneven stone visible across most of this wall.

The red brick lines running through it are something else entirely. They are chimney flues, conduits that carried smoke up from the fireplace of every apartment on every floor to the chimney pots lined up along the roofline. Brick could handle the heat in a way rubble stone could not, so builders ran these flues in brick even while leaving the rest of the wall rough. Higher up, separate flues merge into a shared stack, which is why the lines fan out wider near the bottom and narrow together near the top.

Walls like this only become visible when the building they were meant to lean against disappears, torn down, damaged, or simply never replaced. Walk through almost any older Paris neighborhood and you can usually spot at least one: a blank, scarred gable wall, suddenly exposed to daylight, showing off plumbing it was never designed to show.

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