Escape from Paris!
Some less visited tourist sights
Most tourists visiting Paris stay pretty much in the centre of the city, visiting the regular circuit of the Louvre, Notre Dame, and the Left Bank. There's a mandatory excursion to Versailles, and that's about it.
But some of Paris' greatest treasures are hidden outside of the centre of the city. Just take the metro a few stops, and you can be in a different world. Here are four of the best.
Vincennes
The medieval fortresses of the Bastille and the Louvre have gone. But Paris
still has one medieval castle, at Vincennes – reached on Metro line
number 1. Philip VI built the huge tower keep in the 1330s, and the massive
curtain wall around it was completed about 1410. It's one of the finest
fortresses in the whole of France and yet it seems not to be on the international
tourist's itinerary.
Vincennes also has a fine Gothic chapel which houses a relic of the crown of thorns – kept here for a while before the Sainte Chapelle on the Ile de la Cité was ready to receive it. Two mirror-image baroque palaces were built by Le Vau in the 17th century, but once Versailles had been chosen as the main focus of the court, further work stopped, leaving Vincennes an almost ghostly feel.
Besides, the nineteenth century park, laid out in an English landscape style, is a marvellous contrast to the bustle of central Paris. And if you have more time, and fancy a quite unusual experience and a little exercise, there's an elevated walkway – mostly using old railway viaduct – that runs from Bastille towards the Bois de Vincennes, four and a half kilometres of garden in the sky.
The Canal de l'Ourcq
Or take metro line 5 from Gare du Nord to the Porte de Pantin or Jean Jaurès
station to visit the Canal de l'Ourcq. You can walk along the towpath from
La Villette park, with stunning modernist buildings and follies, towards
the massive old flour mills. These fine Grands Moulins de Pantin were built
in the 1920s with three huge towers; they're mightily impressive, a monument
to the industry of Paris. (Unfortunately part of the complex is now threatened
with demolition.)
There are still boats on the canal – though most traffic is now for leisure rather than freight. And this is an engagingly busy environment, with modern apartment blocks and industrial buildings – the 'real Paris' that the Champs Elysées isn't.
Again, there's a longer excursion if you have more time on your hands – you can take a bicycle all the way along the towpath and into the country, where the canal is bordered by poplars (though you have to cycle along the metro line for a while first). If you have a mountain bike and take all weekend you can even get to Meaux, 50 kilometres away, capital of Brie and its cheese.
Montmartre
Another quicker option if you have time to kill at Gare du Nord is to visit
Montmartre. You could walk both ways, but it's perhaps easier to take the
metro to Barbès-Rochechouart and then walk back downhill.
Again you'll find yourself in a world quite different from the centre of Paris. Although the area has changed since the days of Toulouse-Lautrec and Van Gogh, there are still some streets with cottages and gardens; there's even a vineyard in the Rue des Saules. There are fine views from the 'butte', a steep hill, across Paris, and interesting back alleys, as well as Paris' oldest church, the Romanesque Saint Pierre.
If you want a busier time, visit Pigalle, the centre of the red light district, which also houses an impressive number of rock music emporiums. Or visit the Sacré Coeur, a strangely oriental looking basilica dating from the nineteenth century, which rather reminds me of a railway station – full of bustle.
Saint-Denis
Saint-Denis is a rather industrial, working class quarter, with little to
recommend it unless you're visiting the Stade de France for a football or
rugby match. But it houses one of the greatest works of the early Gothic
period – and the tombs of most of the French kings – in the Basilica
of Saint-Denis.
Abbot Suger started the basilica in 1136; though much of it was rebuilt in the later Gothic period, the ambulatory is still Suger's original, a marvellous work with huge windows and transparent walls. Suger believed that the light of the windows represented the light of divine grace, and his architecture set out to bring that illumination into the body of the church. I actually prefer this basilica to the rather dim Notre Dame.
But where Saint-Denis really scores isn't the architecture so much as the royal tombs, which include some real masterpieces. A number of kings and queens are shown as naked corpses below, and kneeling figures dressed in all their finery above – a rather macabre reminder of mortality. Below, in the crypt are the tombs of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.