Tuileries Garden
The Tuileries Garden runs for nearly a kilometre between the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde, its Grande Allée lined with clipped trees and gravel that crunches under every footstep. At its centre, the octagonal Grand Bassin reflects whatever sky Paris is offering that day — grey or gold, it draws people to its edge.
At 25.5 hectares, this is a working public garden in the truest sense: office workers eat lunch on the green metal chairs, children sail model boats on the round pool, and the two museums tucked at its corners — the Orangerie and the Jeu de Paume — give you a reason to slow down rather than simply cross through.
💛 What travellers fall for
Those who come back tend to arrive early, before the crowds form along the central allée. The green chairs around the Grand Bassin are first-come, first-served and worth claiming. On a return visit, the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel at the Louvre end rewards a slow look — its scale surprises people who only glanced at it before.
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Book directly at the providerHow Tuileries Garden came to be
Catherine de' Medici commissioned this garden in 1564, bringing Florentine landscape architect Bernard de Carnesse from Italy to lay out an Italian Renaissance garden beside her new palace. A century later, André Le Nôtre — whose grandfather had been one of Catherine's own gardeners — was engaged to reshape it entirely. Working from 1666 to 1672, he imposed the formal French geometry still visible today: the long central axis, the terraces, the ornamental basins.
In 1667, at the urging of Charles Perrault, it became the first royal garden opened to the public — though beggars, soldiers and lackeys were turned away. The Revolution brought Louis XVI here under guard in 1789. The Tuileries Palace itself burned during the Paris Commune, stood as a ruin for eleven years, and was demolished in 1882, leaving the garden to become what it is now: the space between two of the world's great museums, and one of Paris's most used patches of ground.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Spring and early autumn are the most comfortable seasons — mild temperatures and the trees in leaf without summer's full crowds. July and August bring heat and long queues near the garden's edges; the extended evening hours (until 11 pm in summer) make late afternoon the better time to visit.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.