Parc Montsouris

The place, briefly

Parc Montsouris is one of the four large parks created under Napoleon III as part of Haussmann's rebuilding of Paris — the southern counterpart to the Buttes-Chaumont in the north, with the Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes at the western and eastern edges. Work began in 1867 and was not entirely finished until 1878.

The engineer was Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand, who ran the city's parks and gardens service and is effectively responsible for the way public green space in Paris looks; the planting was designed with the landscape gardener Jean-Pierre Barillet-Deschamps.

What makes it unusual is what was there first. The plain of Montsouris was occupied by the quarries of Montrouge — the same limestone workings that run under this part of Paris and that hold the Catacombs a little to the north. The park is landscaped over worked-out ground, which is why it rolls and dips the way it does rather than lying flat.

Inside there is a lake, a waterfall, and trees worth the walk on their own: a ginkgo biloba — the tree the French call l'arbre aux quarante écus — and a giant sequoia with a substantial trunk. A five-metre obelisk of dark stone stands in the grounds, and the meteorological observatory of Montsouris, dating in its present form from 1947, sits at the edge of the park.

For film, this is the setting of the long central passage of Cléo from 5 to 7, where Cléo walks down to the waterfall and meets the soldier Antoine. The Palais du Bardo, the Tunisian pavilion visible in the film on the way into the park, burned down in the 1990s; the waterfall is still there.