★★★★★ 5.0
Discover
Bois de Vincennes
Right now, thousands of families are discovering secret trails that wind through what was once a wild forest surrounding ancient Lutecia... that's what Paris was called 2,000 years ago when Romans lived here! In 1854, Emperor Napoleon III's team turned this massive 995-hectare space into an adventure playground for working families in eastern Paris. That's bigger than 1,400 soccer fields combined! The coolest part? There's a giant fake mountain at the zoo that's 65 meters tall... taller than 13 giraffes stacked up, and you can spot it from neighborhoods all across the park! Oh, and this place hosted the very first cricket match between England and France... guess who won?
Did You Know?
- The Bois de Vincennes was originally a royal hunting ground for French monarchs dating back to the 12th century, but in the 19th century, Emperor Napoleon III transformed it into a vast public park for Paris’s working class, complete with artificial lakes, exotic trees, and recreational facilities—mirroring the Bois de Boulogne but with a focus on accessibility for the east of Paris.
- Within the park, you can find architectural gems like the small Doric temple near the lake, designed by Gabriel Davioud—a companion piece to the famous temple in Parc des Buttes-Chaumont—and the Breuil Municipal School of Horticulture, a building personally designed by Empress Eugénie, reflecting her interest in botany and education.
- Bois de Vincennes has hosted major international events, including the 1900 Olympic Summer Games and the Colonial Exhibitions of 1907 and 1931, making it a site of both global sporting history and controversial colonial history, with some of the exhibition pavilions still standing as hidden relics of the past.