Aquaboulevard is a large urban water park in the fifteenth arrondissement of Paris, billed when it opened as the biggest of its kind in Europe. The project was launched by the city of Paris together with the leisure group Forest Hill and opened in April 1989, inaugurated that May by the mayor, Jacques Chirac. Spread over some seven thousand square metres, its centrepiece is a tropical-themed swimming area kept warm all year, with wave pools, waterfalls, geysers, water cannons, jacuzzis, a giant .....

Often called Cineaqua, the Aquarium de Paris occupies a remarkable spot carved into the hillside of the Trocadero gardens, directly across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower. Its origins are extraordinary: first built for the Universal Exhibition of 1878, it is regarded as the ancestor of all the public aquariums in the world, and it was greatly enlarged for the 1937 exhibition, when it ranked as the largest in Europe. After closing in 1986 the site fell quiet for two decades before a major redevel.....

Standing at the centre of the great star of avenues from which it takes its setting, the Arc de Triomphe is one of the defining monuments of Paris, raised to honour those who fought and died for France in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Napoleon ordered its construction in 1806 after his victory at Austerlitz, but the work dragged on through changes of regime and the arch was not completed until 1836, long after his fall. Designed by Jean-Francois-Therese Chalgrin in a severe neoclassica.....

The studio-museum of Chana Orloff preserves the working home of one of the most accomplished sculptors of the School of Paris, kept much as she left it in a quiet cul-de-sac in the fourteenth arrondissement. Born in Ukraine in 1888 and arriving in Paris as a young woman, Orloff became a celebrated portraitist and sculptor in the lively artistic world of Montparnasse, counting many leading figures of the day among her sitters and friends. In 1926 she commissioned the architect Auguste Perret, a .....

Tethered to the ground by a cable in the Parc Andre Citroen, the Ballon de Paris is a giant helium balloon that lifts passengers high above the southwest of the city for a panoramic view stretching across the rooftops to the Eiffel Tower and beyond. Unlike a hot-air balloon, it does not drift away but rises and descends on its cable from a fixed point in the park, carrying groups of visitors in a circular basket to a height of around one hundred and fifty metres. The balloon dates in its present.....

Far below the streets of the fourteenth arrondissement lies one of the most macabre and unforgettable sights in Paris: the Catacombs, a network of former quarry tunnels lined with the carefully stacked bones of some six million people. The galleries were originally dug to extract the limestone that built much of the city above, and by the eighteenth century the old cemeteries of central Paris had become dangerously overcrowded and unhealthy. The authorities decided to empty them, and from 1786 t.....

Housed in a wing of the monumental Palais de Chaillot overlooking the Trocadero, the Cite de l'architecture et du patrimoine is the largest museum of architecture in the world and a place to understand the built heritage of France across nearly a thousand years. It opened in its present form in 2007, bringing together a museum of monuments founded in the nineteenth century with collections devoted to modern and contemporary architecture. Its most celebrated feature is the gallery of casts, the G.....

Since the nineteenth century, La Closerie des Lilas at 171 Boulevard du Montparnasse has been a gathering place for the artistic and literary elite of Paris. The roll-call of former regulars reads like a syllabus of French and American letters: Verlaine, Baudelaire and Mallarme, and later Hemingway, who wrote part of The Sun Also Rises at its tables, with small brass plaques still marking the favoured seats of its famous patrons. The interior is a beauty in its own right, with mosaic floor til.....

Few structures are as instantly recognisable as the Eiffel Tower, the wrought-iron lattice that has stood over the Champ de Mars since 1889 and become the enduring emblem of Paris and of France itself. It was designed by the engineer Gustave Eiffel and his team as the centrepiece of the Universal Exhibition held to mark the centenary of the French Revolution, and at some three hundred metres it was the tallest structure in the world for over forty years. Far from being universally admired at fir.....

A pioneer among the private art foundations that have transformed the cultural life of Paris, the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain was created in 1984 by the jewellery house Cartier to support and exhibit living artists. For three decades its home was a luminous glass-and-steel building on the Boulevard Raspail in Montparnasse, designed by the architect Jean Nouvel and opened in 1994, in which transparent walls dissolved the boundary between the gallery, its garden and the street. The f.....