19th arrondissement

Highlights: Buttes-Chaumont · La Villette · Canal de l'Ourcq · Bassin de la Villette · Mouzaïa · Belleville

Long covered with quarries and canals, the 19th arrondissement has made water, greenery and culture its assets. From the romantic park of the Buttes-Chaumont to the vast spaces of La Villette, from the lively banks of the bassin de la Villette to the flowered villas of the Mouzaïa, it composes a working-class and cosmopolitan Paris, where nature and creation hold a place rare in the capital.

Quarries, canals and heights

Before its incorporation into Paris, the territory of the 19th was a landscape of gypsum quarries and hills, marked in the Middle Ages by the grim gibbet of Montfaucon, the kingdom's principal place of execution. It was a district of industry and toil, set apart from the city.

In the early 19th century, Napoleon had the canal de l'Ourcq dug and the bassin de la Villette laid out, inaugurated in 1808 to supply Paris with water and goods. Around these stretches of water an intense trade in goods and warehousing developed.

A park born of the quarries

In 1867, under the Second Empire, the engineer Alphand transformed a former site of quarries and depots into one of the most spectacular gardens in Paris: the parc des Buttes-Chaumont, with its lake, its cliff, its temple de la Sibylle perched on an islet and its vertiginous bridges.

This masterpiece of romantic landscaping, given to the inhabitants of the working-class north-east, remains today one of the parks most cherished by Parisians, a haven of greenery at the heart of a dense arrondissement.

La Villette, from cattle to culture

The year 1867 also saw the opening of the slaughterhouses and cattle market of La Villette, an immense complex that supplied Paris with meat for more than a century. The Grande Halle aux bœufs, a masterpiece of metal architecture, was its flagship.

Closed in 1974, these slaughterhouses left a vast expanse of land that the City reconverted into a major cultural hub: the parc de la Villette, designed by Bernard Tschumi and opened in 1987, the Cité des sciences et de l'industrie, the Géode and, in 2015, the Philharmonie de Paris designed by Jean Nouvel.

Perched villages and a mosaic of peoples

To the east, the Mouzaïa quarter aligns its cobbled lanes and its low cottages crowned with wisteria, a former workers' estate built on old quarries and become one of the most charming corners of Paris. Further south, the heights of Belleville, shared with the 20th, look out over the city.

A land of welcome for successive waves of immigration, the 19th is one of the most cosmopolitan arrondissements of the capital, where communities, languages and cultures from all over the world stand side by side, in an unabashed working-class vitality.

Living in the 19th today

Along the bassin de la Villette, now a place for strolling, summer bathing and outings, the arrondissement offers a new quality of life, between cinemas, guinguettes and barges. The Buttes-Chaumont, the Philharmonie and the canals make it a district at once green and cultural.

To live in the 19th is to choose an authentic and lively Paris, where water, parks and creation compose a working-class and open art of living, at a remove from the tourist tumult of the centre.