Paris visitor guide
A 25-hectare, steep, highly landscaped park that is one of Paris’s most original green spaces. The city highlights panoramic terrain, cliffs, grotto-style features, and a strong biodiversity focus; it is also a major place for walking and family leisure.
Photo by Adilson Guaiati
The story behind the place
Buttes-Chaumont is memorable because it was not simply planted; it was engineered into being. Paris created the park in the Second Empire era under Napoleon III, opening it in 1867 for the Universal Exhibition. The site had been a former gypsum quarry and unstable rubble ground, so the landscape had to be reshaped into something both scenic and safe. That explains its dramatic character: steep relief, cliffs, grotto-like features, bridges, and a deliberately theatrical composition rather than a flat promenading garden. The city presents it as a major achievement of 19th-century landscape art and as a place where Paris recreated fragments of French scenery inside the capital. Today, its appeal is part classic city park, part landscape spectacle, and part urban biodiversity corridor.
[3][1][2]Know before you go
A 25-hectare, steep, highly landscaped park that is one of Paris’s most original green spaces. The city highlights panoramic terrain, cliffs, grotto-style features, and a strong biodiversity focus; it is also a major place for walking and family leisure.
[1][3][2][4]The park is officially flagged as having improved accessibility, but it remains physically demanding in parts because of its steep topography and uneven ground. The city also notes current renovation work, including a closed central zone around the Temple de la Sibylle.
[4][1][2]The museum is housed in the Hôtel Salé in the Marais and holds the largest Picasso collection in the world, making it the core Paris stop for visitors focused on Picasso’s work.
Sacré-Cœur is one of Paris’s most emblematic monuments, known for its white Romanesque-Byzantine silhouette, its hilltop setting on Montmartre, and broad views over the city. The site also includes the crypt and the dome, which adds a higher 360° viewpoint if you choose to pay for access.
Place des Vosges is Paris’s oldest planned square and a major Marais landmark: a symmetrical brick-and-stone ensemble with arcades, a landscaped central garden, and a classic place to start a Marais stroll. It is also the setting for the Maison de Victor Hugo at no. 6, which adds cultural interest beyond the square itself.
Last updated September 16, 2026
