A lock on the Canal Saint-Martin is not a view. It is a piece of hydraulic machinery standing still in the middle of the city: two paved quays, two matching service huts, a rectangle of dark green water with the plane trees reflected whole in it, and at the far end the vault under which the canal disappears. From the arched iron footbridges you look down on all of it, and when a barge comes into the chamber the level rises in front of you, slowly, over a quarter of an hour.
This piece of Paris has a reputation that doesn’t fit it, the one about a fashionable district of bars and places to stroll. Underneath there are four buildings and four architects spread over four centuries, from Henri IV’s hospital to the nineteenth-century cemetery, and you can see almost all of it without paying. The real constraint isn’t the price but the distance: it is about three kilometres from the hôpital Saint-Louis to Père-Lachaise, so the métro here isn’t a fallback. It’s how you do the circuit.
What is a villa modelled on the Veneto doing at the top of a hill in Belleville, with free admission?
Let’s go!
Four architects, four centuries, and a circuit you don’t do on foot
Geography first, because it’s the thing that wastes the most time here. The five stops sit along a long arc, not on one block. The canal and the hospital are close to each other, the Rotonde is north towards the bassin de la Villette, the Carré de Baudouin is high up to the east on the hill of Ménilmontant, and Père-Lachaise is south of it. Four of the five points are on line 2, and the only one that is not is the canal. Two of those stops, Stalingrad and Jaurès, are among the line’s four elevated stations, on the two kilometres where it runs on a viaduct above the boulevards: you arrive there looking out of the window, and you do the rest of the circuit underground.
Then the calendar, which is simple and generous. The canal, the hospital and the cemetery are open seven days a week, so there is no day on which this circuit falls through. The only places that shut on Mondays are the indoor ones, the Pavillon Carré de Baudouin and, further north, the CENTQUATRE; the Carré de Baudouin is closed on Sundays as well, and that last detail doesn’t come from an official page, so check it.
The constraint that really changes your day is seasonal. From 6 November Père-Lachaise closes early, at 17:30, and from December onwards you come out of the cemetery in the dark: a plan written for October and read in December sends you up against a gate that has already shut. Bear in mind, too, that nothing in this district opens free on the first Sunday of the month, simply because almost everything is free already or is street. Don’t go looking for it, it isn’t there.
1. The Canal Saint-Martin and its locks
The canal is a piece of nineteenth-century engineering built to bring water and goods into Paris, and the open stretch between République and the bassin de la Villette is the one you walk. You’ll find paved quays with plane trees planted in a row, a sequence of locks, and the arched iron footbridges you look down at the water from.
You pay nothing, you’ll find no opening hours and there is no door: this is street. Stop above a lock and wait for a boat to come through, because the sequence of gates is the only thing that explains to you what all of it was for. On the north side the canal opens into the bassin de la Villette, and there the view suddenly widens onto a broad sheet of water.
If you’re wondering how much of Paris you can see without a ticket, I did the whole count, museum by museum, in Paris for free.
2. The hôpital Saint-Louis, the seventeenth-century courtyard nobody looks at
A few minutes from the canal there’s a quadrangle of red brick and pale stone that almost no visitor walks through, and it is the oldest thing in this guide. The hospital was founded by Henri IV in 1607, to take the pressure off the Hôtel-Dieu during an outbreak of plague, and built between 1607 and 1612 by Claude Vellefaux, to drawings by Claude Chastillon. At its centre you’ll find a square courtyard about a hundred and twenty metres on a side, today a public garden with free access, enclosed by four ranges punctuated by pavilions. You walk in and sit down exactly as you would in any neighbourhood garden.
Here comes the connection that makes the detour worth it. The same king, the same years and the same scheme of brick and stone give you place des Vosges, built between 1605 and 1612 on the other side of the city. They are two pieces of one building campaign: one famous and photographed every day, the other inside a working hospital. Look at the two façades one after the other and you’ll recognise the same hand, the brick held between chains of pale stone. The square, with its history of tournaments and duels, is the first stop in What to see in the Marais.
The listings among the historic monuments are staggered across the twentieth century, with the buildings listed in 1982 and the chapel in 1993. None of these facts comes from an official source, because the Ville de Paris gives the hospital no practical page of its own. The dates circulate on several sources that agree with one another, but two of them put the completion at 1611 rather than 1612. I’d rather tell you that than choose for you.
3. The Rotonde de la Villette, to be looked at and not visited
Why does a tollhouse have the columns of a temple?
At the far end of the bassin de la Villette, on the open ground in front of the Stalingrad stop, you come up against a building that looks as though it arrived from another city. It is a cylindrical drum of pale stone set on an arcaded gallery with paired columns, and underneath it runs a portico with a triangular pediment. This is the barrière Saint-Martin, built by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux between 1784 and 1788, and its job was to collect a toll: the wall of the Fermiers généraux ringed Paris and its gates were customs houses, which Ledoux wanted as monumental as a basilica.
Very few of those tollhouses are still standing, and this is one of them: the building is listed among the historic monuments.
Warning: this is not a visit. Inside there are now a restaurant and a private exhibition space, so if you turn up expecting an open monument you’ll find a menu. Look at it from outside and walk right round the drum, which is the only way to see how Ledoux fitted a cylinder inside a square. And if the style reminds you of something, there’s a reason: the twin pavilions on place Denfert-Rochereau, at the other end of Paris, are by the same architect and belong to the same toll wall. Between those two pavilions the entrance to the Catacombes de Paris faces the entrance to the museum of the Liberation.
4. The Pavillon Carré de Baudouin, the Venetian villa of Ménilmontant
Climb up to 121 rue de Ménilmontant, and behind the street wall you’ll find an eighteenth-century country house whose garden front carries a peristyle of four Ionic columns under a triangular pediment.
Its history is a chain of changes of owner. The land was inherited in 1745 by Nicolas Carré de Baudouin, who around 1770 asked Pierre-Louis Moreau, at the time maître des bâtiments to the Ville de Paris, to design him the pavilion. The Ville de Paris writes, on its own page, that the architect took his cue from the villas of the Veneto. In France a house like this was called a folie, a pleasure house outside the city, and this one was known at first as «de Pompadour». In the nineteenth century it belonged to the Goncourt family, and Jules and Edmond described it in their Journal as an enchanting place; from 1836 the Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul ran a girls’ boarding house here and later an orphanage. It has been listed among the historic monuments since 1928.
Today it is a cultural centre run by the twentieth arrondissement, with three exhibitions a year, and admission is declared free for the whole programme, guided tours, meetings with artists and workshops included. It reopened on 25 March 2023 after nine months of works, carried out because the stone was decaying, the exhibition rooms lacked light and the auditorium was old. What you see is a building that has just been put back in order: if you were after an atmospheric ruin, you won’t find one here.
There is one problem, and it concerns the hours. The Ville de Paris refuses to publish them, and writes that they depend on the programme, sending you to the pavilion’s own site. Secondary sources give Tuesday to Saturday 11:00-18:00 with Thursday until 20:30, but those are not official figures and I’m not handing them to you as though they were. The practical rule is a different one: this house opens when there is an exhibition on, so look at the programme before you climb all the way up, and don’t plan it for a Monday.
5. Père-Lachaise cemetery
Why does a cemetery belong in an art history guide and not in a collection of curiosities?
Because of the funerary sculpture: in a few hundred metres you pass from neoclassicism to nineteenth-century realism and on to the forms of the early twentieth century, and among the rest you’ll find the tombs of Géricault and Delacroix.
Admission is free, seven days a week, all year round, public holidays included, and the cemetery takes more than three million visitors a year. What opens in front of you is not a lawn with headstones on it: it is a hill with sloping cobbled avenues, flights of steps, tall trees and stone chapels packed up against one another, in other words a city in miniature. The layout is by Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart and goes back to the first years of the nineteenth century, even though the Ville de Paris page publishes neither the architect’s name nor the opening date.
Warning: one of the tombs people most come here to find can’t be seen at the moment. The monument to Héloïse and Abélard is behind hoardings, and the Ville de Paris states that it will be visible again, restored and consolidated, when the works end, in August 2027. Go before then and you’ll find a sheet.
Two practical rules, as well, that make the difference between a visit and an embarrassment. Clearing the cemetery starts a quarter of an hour before closing time, and from that moment nobody else gets in, so turning up ten minutes before the stated hour means staying outside. And the rules are strict, for a reason that is easily forgotten: funerals are held here every day. No alcohol, no picnics, no speakers or musical instruments, no dogs even on a lead. No bicycles or scooters either, not even wheeled by hand, no running and no treasure hunts. The five tombs I’d start from, and the way to find your bearings among the divisions, are in Père-Lachaise cemetery: 5 tombs to visit.
The Buttes-Chaumont, and why they aren’t a stop today
The park is there, it’s free and you can walk through it whenever you like, but I’m not sending you to see it the way you see a monument, and the reason is a building site. The Ville de Paris declares the whole central part of the park closed and off limits, meaning the island, the two waterfalls, part of the walk round the lake and the Temple de la Sibylle, the little temple you can see in the photograph above. It is to be renewed «over several years», because the foundations sit on an old gypsum quarry and are fragile, and no reopening date has been published. That is exactly the part that makes this park a work of art rather than a garden.
The history stays with you, though, and it’s worth the detour just to understand what you’re looking at from a distance. The park was opened in April 1867, for the Universal Exposition, and the Ville de Paris calls it a masterpiece of landscape art under Napoleon III. It covers twenty-five hectares that build different landscapes from scratch, from cliffs to high mountain meadows, and as you walk through them you can’t tell where the natural ends and the constructed begins. Before that it was a quarry. The gypsum of this hill is the material that earned Paris the nickname «Lutèce la blanche», the white; quarrying began in the eighteenth century and went on until 1860, and the park was created on the closed workings by a decision of Napoleon III. The temple on top of the crag is a copy of the one at Tivoli. One last thing, if you go in spring or summer: the water of the great waterfall can be turned off, because it is used to irrigate the park.
Why you won’t find photographs of Belleville
Two honest things to tell you about this guide. The first is about the title: the circuit runs along the edge of Belleville rather than through it, because the Carré de Baudouin sits on the hill of Ménilmontant and Père-Lachaise at its foot, and Belleville is the walk between the two rather than a stop with a door. The second is about the images, given that every one above is of an old building. Belleville today is known above all for its murals, and of those there is practically no reusable photograph. Street art is the work of living artists and stays under copyright, and in France freedom of panorama excludes commercial uses, which means it doesn’t cover a site like this one. The same goes for the Philharmonie, which is by a living architect: look for a free image of it and you won’t find one. What stays illustrable is the eighteenth and nineteenth-century architecture, and that is why searching for this district online mostly brings you the canal and the cemetery.
It’s worth knowing before you leave: the painted walls are something you look at on the spot, and they are also the thing here that changes fastest, because a mural lasts as long as the wall it’s on.
If you carry on towards la Villette
Two additions for anyone with time to spare, and both sit outside the district proper. The CENTQUATRE, at 5 rue Curial, is the former municipal funeral service building turned into a cultural centre, and it opens Tuesday to Friday 12:00-19:00 and Saturday and Sunday 11:00-19:00, closed on Mondays. Its site lists «free spaces», the naves you can walk into without a show: the shows you pay for, while on admission to the naves I found no stated price, so I’m not promising you it’s free.
Further north, at Porte de Pantin, the Musée de la musique sits inside the Philharmonie. It is two kilometres from the Rotonde, the northern end of this circuit, and five from the other end: a separate outing, not a stop on this one. Full price costs 10 euros, anyone between 26 and 28 pays 8 and under 26s get in free. The museum opens 12:00-18:00 on weekdays, closes on Mondays and is included in the Paris Museum Pass. The instruments to look for first are in Musée de la musique: 6 instruments at the Philharmonie.
Practical information
Figures checked on 2 October 2026 on the official sites of the individual venues. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you travel.
Tickets. Four of the five stops ask for no ticket, because the canal is street, the courtyard of the hôpital Saint-Louis is a public garden, Père-Lachaise is free and the Pavillon Carré de Baudouin declares free admission for its whole programme. The Rotonde de la Villette can’t be visited at all, because it houses a restaurant. The Musée de la musique, which is the addition outside the district, costs 10 euros full price and 8 euros between 26 and 28. Opening hours. The canal and the hospital courtyard have no opening hours. Père-Lachaise opens every day, with admission closing a quarter of an hour before the gate, and it changes to its winter regime on 6 November, when closing moves earlier to 17:30. The CENTQUATRE opens 12:00-19:00 from Tuesday to Friday and 11:00-19:00 on Saturday and Sunday. The Musée de la musique opens 12:00-18:00 on weekdays. No published hours. The Ville de Paris doesn’t publish the hours of the Pavillon Carré de Baudouin, because they depend on the programme, and it sends you to the pavilion’s site. Secondary sources give Tuesday to Saturday 11:00-18:00, with Thursday until 20:30, and those are not official figures. The seasonal hours of Père-Lachaise sit in a table on the city site that I couldn’t read, so take the changeover date as good and check the hour yourself. Closures and building works. The Pavillon Carré de Baudouin closes on Mondays and, according to unofficial sources, on Sundays as well. The CENTQUATRE and the Musée de la musique close on Mondays. At Père-Lachaise the monument to Héloïse and Abélard is under works until August 2027. At the Buttes-Chaumont the whole central part of the park is closed, Temple de la Sibylle included, for a renewal lasting several years with no date announced. Free admission. Père-Lachaise is free for everyone, every day of the year, public holidays included. The Pavillon Carré de Baudouin is free for everyone. The Musée de la musique is free under 26, and it is the only age-based concession in this guide. No venue in the district applies the free first Sunday of the month. Cemetery rules. At Père-Lachaise alcohol, picnics, speakers and musical instruments, dogs even on a lead, bicycles and scooters even when wheeled by hand, running and organised trails are all forbidden: funerals are held there every day. Getting there. Jacques Bonsergent on line 5 and République on lines 3, 5, 8, 9 and 11 drop you on the Canal Saint-Martin. Goncourt on line 11 and Colonel Fabien on line 2 serve the hôpital Saint-Louis. Jaurès on lines 2, 5 and 7 bis and Stalingrad on lines 2, 5 and 7 are the stops for the Rotonde and the bassin de la Villette. Pyrénées and Ménilmontant on line 2 take you to the Carré de Baudouin. Père-Lachaise on lines 2 and 3 and Philippe Auguste on line 2 serve the cemetery. Riquet on line 7 is the stop for the CENTQUATRE, and Porte de Pantin on line 5 and tram 3B the one for the Philharmonie. How long it takes. The canal and the hospital courtyard take an hour and a half between them, because they are close together. Père-Lachaise on its own asks for two hours, and three if you hunt down the tombs one by one. The Carré de Baudouin can be seen in forty minutes when it’s open. With the journeys between stops, the full circuit is a whole day, and half a day is enough only if you choose the canal or the cemetery, not both.
The circuit, from north to south
This circuit follows line 2 and comes down from the north. Start at the Rotonde early in the morning, when the open ground is empty and the stone stands sharp against the light, walk down along the bassin de la Villette to the canal and carry on south as far as the hôpital Saint-Louis. From there take the métro instead of pressing on by foot, and go back up to Ménilmontant for the Carré de Baudouin if the exhibition is open. Finish at Père-Lachaise, the one stop that improves in the late afternoon, when the low light comes in sideways between the chapels.
One last caution about the time. From November onwards, if you reverse the order, you risk reaching the cemetery after 17:15 and finding the keepers already moving everyone out. If your trip is short and this district is one day out of three, slot it into the route I set out in What to see in Paris in 3 days. And if you arrive with the Paris Museum Pass in your pocket, be aware that you’ll hardly ever use it here, because almost everything is free already.
Photographs: lock on the Canal Saint-Martin by DiscoA340, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons; Rotonde de la Villette by Guilhem Vellut, CC BY 2.0; Temple de la Sibylle by BikerNormand, CC BY-SA 2.0; avenue in Père-Lachaise by Pierre-Yves Beaudouin, CC BY-SA 3.0.
