The Medieval Marais Walk
Paris, France
The Marais is one of Paris’s great time capsules, where medieval streets and remnants of the old city stand beside grand town houses and later classical and Baroque buildings. Once low marshland on the edge of Paris, it became fashionable in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as aristocrats built hôtels particuliers around courtyards and gardens. Key sights include Hôtel de Ville, Rue François Miron’s medieval houses, Hôtel de Sens, Place des Vosges, and the Archives Nationales.
The stops
- 01 Hôtel de Ville
Hôtel de Ville is Paris's city hall on the Place de l'Hôtel de Ville in the Marais, rebuilt in the late nineteenth century after the fire of 1871.
- 02 Rue François Miron's medieval houses
Rue François Miron in the Marais preserves two fourteenth-century houses at numbers 11 and 13, among the oldest surviving domestic buildings in Paris.
- 03 Hôtel de Sens
Hôtel de Sens is a late fifteenth-century Gothic mansion in the Marais, built for the Archbishop of Sens and now housing the Bibliothèque Forney.
- 04 Wall of Philip II Augustus
The Wall of Philip II Augustus is a surviving fragment of Paris's late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century city wall in the Marais, built under King Philip II.
- 05 Église Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis
Église Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis is a seventeenth-century Baroque church on Rue Saint-Antoine in the Marais, completed in 1627 and associated with the Jesuits.
- 06 Hôtel de Sully
Hôtel de Sully is an early seventeenth-century hôtel particulier in the Marais, built for the Duke of Sully and now housing the Centre des Monuments Nationaux.
- 07 Place des Vosges
Place des Vosges is a planned early seventeenth-century square in the Marais, created under Henri the Fourth and lined with uniform brick-and-stone pavilions.
- 08 Musée Carnavalet
Musée Carnavalet is the City of Paris history museum in two Marais mansions, founded in 1866 to preserve the capital's past.
- 09 Rue Pavee
Rue Pavée is a street in the northern Marais whose name recalls paving, and it is best known today for the Art Nouveau synagogue built by Hector Guimard.
- 10 Rue des Rosiers
Rue des Rosiers is the historic heart of the Jewish quarter in the Marais, a street long associated with Jewish shops, bakeries, and community life.
- 11 Église Notre-Dame des Blancs-Manteaux
Église Notre-Dame des Blancs-Manteaux is a Baroque church in the Marais, rebuilt in the late seventeenth century on the site of a medieval monastic foundation.
- 12 Archives Nationales
The Archives Nationales occupies the Hôtel de Soubise and Hôtel de Rohan in the Marais and preserves France's national records from antiquity onward.
The narration at every stop is in the app — this is the map of where it takes you, with a line on each stop.
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Walk The Medieval Marais Walk with a voice in your ear.
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