Tuileries Gardens

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A vast parkland area separates the Louvre Museum from the place de la Concorde, and is referred to as the Tuileries Gardens; all three of these are aligned with the Champs-Élysées and La Défense. The photo above shows one small part of the western end of the Tuileries.

The Tuileries have been around for some four centuries in one form or another. They get their name from the fact that clay from the area was used to make ceramic tiles (a tuilerie is a tile factory). Many royal families and innumerable Parisians and tourists have walked through these gardens.

As with so many Paris monuments, it is very hard to get a good, overall view of the Tuileries gardens. This is just a first attempt, for the sake of completeness in my gallery. I'll try to do better as I gradually update images.

You are looking almost west in the photo (the axis of the Louvre-Tuileries-Champs runs roughly west northwest), taken on an afternoon in April with intermittent showers (which is why the pond in the foreground is in shadow). The big Ferris wheel in the background was a temporary attraction for the year 2000 and was called the Roue de Paris; it was finally removed after a pathetic fuss put up by the owner to keep it there beyond the terms of his original agreement was overruled by City Hall (the wheel was a tremendous cash cow for its owner, but it ruined the entire look of this area, and I'm glad it's gone). If you look very closely near the base of the wheel, you can see the sunlit Arc de Triomphe in the distance, and some of the high-rise buildings of La Défense beyond it. I plan to update this picture eventually with one that does not show this giant wheel.

The Tuileries are mentioned by Dan Brown in his bestselling novel, The Da Vinci Code. Near the beginning of the novel, he describes a police officer driving through them on his way from the Ritz Hotel to the Louvre. Well, that's pretty farfetched for a number of reasons. One of them is that the gardens are surrounded by a big iron fence that is padlocked shut at night. Another is that the only paths through the gardens are gravel paths for pedestrians—there are no roads. Finally, there are streets on every side of the gardens that lead to the same destinations as the paths inside the gardens … so a police car has absolutely no reason to crash through the gates and zoom up rough gravel paths when it can just drive down the paved streets that parallel the gardens only a few tens of metres away. I'm sorry to say that Dan made a zillion mistakes in describing Paris in that novel, and this is just one of them.

Photographed in early April, 2001.