In 1931 this building celebrated the French colonial empire. Today it houses the national museum of the history of immigration, and not a stone of it has changed: the same low relief on the front, the same frescoes inside, and now it tells the story of the people who arrived in France. The Palais de la Porte Dorée looks out over the edge of the bois de Vincennes, at the eastern end of the city, in the same twelfth arrondissement as the Musée Méliès, and in the same building there is also a tropical aquarium that has never closed since 1931.
At the desk you will find two tickets in front of you, and it is worth having chosen beforehand: the museum and the aquarium cost 12 euros each and are paid for separately, while the combined ticket costs 16. And under-26s go in free, to both of them.
What does a museum of immigration do with a palace built for the empire?
Let’s go!
1. Eighteen months for the Colonial Exposition
The palace was built for the International Colonial Exposition of 1931 to a design by Albert Laprade, and it went up in eighteen months. It is one of the most important art deco monuments in Paris, with its front of slender columns, its great squared volumes and its decoration built into the architecture instead of stuck on top of it.
It opened as the Musée des Colonies, and it has carried four names since. It became the Musée de la France d’outre-mer in 1935, then the Musée des arts africains et océaniens in 1960. In June 2006 the ethnographic collections moved to the quai Branly, and only the aquarium was left in the building. The Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration opened here in October 2007.
Read also: Musée du quai Branly: 7 works to see in the museum under the trees
2. Freedom of panorama, and the French limit
Why will you not see a single photograph of the palace on this page?
The reason is not carelessness on the part of photographers, and it is the same reason that decides which photographs go with this article.
In France freedom of panorama exists but excludes commercial use. It means a private individual can photograph a building and publish the picture on their own profile, but a site carrying advertising or affiliate links, like this one, cannot use the image of a work of architecture or sculpture still protected by copyright.
Here all three authors of the palace are protected: the architect Albert Laprade, who died in 1978, the sculptor of the low relief Alfred Janniot, who died in 1969, and the painter of the frescoes Pierre-Henri Ducos de La Haille, who died in 1972. In France protection lasts seventy years from the author’s death, so for all three of them we are still inside it.
The result is that not one photograph in this article shows the palace: the only free images of the Porte Dorée are those of the animals in the aquarium, and they are the ones you will see. The building is described here in words, and you will look at it in person.
3. The low relief, 1,128 square metres of facade
The front is covered by a single stone low relief by Alfred Janniot, and the measurements say what the ambition of the project was: 1,128 square metres, 13 metres high and 90 wide.
The subject is the abundance of the colonies, with human figures, animals, plants and goods woven into one continuous flow, with no frames separating the scenes: take a few minutes on the pavement before you go in, because from inside you cannot see it. Inside, the central hall, the forum, carries more than 600 square metres of fresco that Ducos de La Haille painted with seven assistants, on the contribution of France to its overseas territories.
This is where the knot lies, and you notice it as soon as you go in, because the museum does not dodge it. The building is a monument of colonial propaganda kept intact, and the choice was made to leave it that way instead of cleaning it up.
And there is something almost nobody knows: the Forum, the hall of honour, the historic salons and the esplanade can be visited free, with no ticket. You can go in, spend half an hour under the six hundred square metres of fresco and come out without paying anything. The comparison between what the front declares and what the museum rooms tell is the strongest thing about the day, and the first half of it costs nothing.
4. Eleven dates, from 1685 to today
The museum’s permanent display has been remade and reopened on 17 June 2023, larger and more accessible than before.
You walk it along eleven key dates, from 1685 to today, and at each stop you find three levels interwoven: the historical data, the events and the life stories of individuals. The museum holds more than eight thousand cultural objects and it is the only one in Europe to treat this subject at such length. The argument is stated at the start and runs through all of it: immigration is not a separate chapter, it is a component of the history of France.
Among the new spaces there are a music studio and a television lounge, designed for a young audience, where you listen and watch instead of reading panels. If you come with teenagers, these are the places where they really do stop.
5. The aquarium, which has been there since the first day
The tropical aquarium was born with the palace, in 1931, and the idea came from marshal Lyautey, the commissioner general of the Exposition: he wanted the French to see the aquatic fauna of the colonial territories with their own eyes.
In 1934 the pit was dug at the centre of the aquarium, designed with a sculptor’s help as one of Laprade’s installations, with ornamental basins and artificial rocks forming what was then called a «corner of savannah», inhabited by crocodiles, tortoises, monkeys and African birds. The pit is still there, and today you look at it through glass walls instead of from above.
At the beginning there was also a gallery of products: it showed how certain species were exploited industrially, with tortoiseshell, crocodile skins and corals. In 1968 those dioramas on the use of colonial waters were dismantled and replaced with new tanks, arranged by geography instead of by yield: the aquarium decolonised its own display almost forty years before the palace changed museum.
Today the collection numbers some 4,400 animals of 350 species in 84 tanks.
6. Sixty-two years of crocodiles, and two white alligators
The most famous animals in this place were the Nile crocodiles, which arrived in 1948 already adult thanks to Théodore Monod, the naturalist who then directed the Institut français d’Afrique noire. The last of the group lived in the pit until 2010: sixty-two years, three generations of Parisians coming back to see them again.
In their place today there are two female albino alligators, Laury and Dundy, sisters born in 2014. The photograph at the top of this page shows one of the two: the cream white skin, the scales just touched by the green light of the tank and the pink eye, which is the sign of albinism. The vertical slit pupil, on the other hand, is what every alligator has.
Go up to the glass and watch them lie still. A white alligator does not survive in the wild, because skin without pigment burns in the sun and because in water it is visible to any predator: these animals exist only in captivity, and that fact is part of what you are looking at.
7. The animals almost everyone walks past
How many visitors stop in front of a brown fish resting on the bottom?
Few, and they are wrong, because three of the most interesting tanks are exactly the ones that look empty.
The Australian lungfish in the photograph above is a fish that breathes air. It has lungs as well as gills and comes up to the surface to take a breath, and its pectoral fins, as you can see, are shaped like a fleshy paddle instead of a fan. It is the closest living relative of the vertebrates that came out of the water, and it has reached us almost unchanged.
The electric catfish is that brown sack with the long barbels, motionless on the bottom. Its electric organs take up nearly the whole of its body, under the skin, and the discharge it produces is enough to stun a prey animal. The ancient Egyptians knew it well: it appears in tomb reliefs from more than five thousand years ago, and a catfish even goes into the name of the first pharaoh, on the Narmer palette.
The red-bellied piranha, lastly, is the animal about which the cinema has told more lies than about any other. In the tank you see it for what it is: a deep fish flattened at the sides, with a silver-flecked back and an orange throat, which swims in a shoal and spends most of its time still. In the wild it eats mainly fish, insects and carrion, and the shoals serve to defend it, not to attack.
Practical information
Details checked on 27 September 2026 on the official site palais-portedoree.fr. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you go.
Free with no ticket. The esplanade, the hall of honour, the Forum with the frescoes and the historic salons of the palace are freely accessible. Tickets. The museum or the aquarium cost 12 euros full price and 9 reduced. The combined ticket, which covers both, costs 16 euros full price and 13 reduced. Opening hours. The palace opens Tuesday to Friday 10:00-17:30 and Saturday and Sunday 10:00-19:00. The last admission to the spaces is an hour before closing. Closing days. It closes on Mondays, on 1 January, 1 May and 25 December. Free admission. Under-26s go in free. The museum is also free on the first Sunday of the month, and entry is free for jobseekers, for refugees, for disabled visitors and a companion, for disabled war veterans and for teachers with the pass. Paris Museum Pass. The immigration museum is included in the pass. The aquarium, on the other hand, is paid for separately. Getting there. The address is 293 avenue Daumesnil, in the twelfth. Get off at Porte Dorée on line 8. Otherwise take tram T3 or buses 46 and 201. There is also a Vélib station in front of the palace. How long it takes. The palace gives at least an hour for the aquarium and two for the museum and the monument. With the combined ticket, reckon on half a day.
Where to go from here
The collections that were in this palace until 2006 are now at the Musée du quai Branly, and it is the visit that completes this one most directly: the same objects, the opposite museography.
Two museums belong beside this one because they do the same work on another subject: the Musée Carnavalet, which is the history of the city, and the Musée de la Libération, which is the history of how the city came out of the war in 1944. Asian and Arab art, on the other hand, are told without the colonial frame by the Musée Guimet and the Institut du monde arabe.
Photo credits: albino alligator by Cedricguppy (CC BY-SA 4.0), from Wikimedia Commons; dwarf crocodile by Thesupermat (CC BY-SA 3.0); piranha by Citron (CC BY-SA 3.0); lungfish and electric catfish by Vassil (CC0).
