Le Bois de Boulogne
A trip into Paris' best park
There’s a great swath of green space in Paris that I’ve been wanting to visit for a long time. It’s a large rectangular block of vegetation that sits snugly between the Périphérique (Paris’ ring road) and the Seine in the west of the city. To the north of the block, there is the rich suburb of Neuilly and to the south, another one called Boulogne-Billancourt.
This past Thursday, I thought “enough is enough” and decided to make a trip over to the mysterious park. I began my adventure to the west in Saint-Cloud, and wandered over its famous, lamp-lit passerelle into the trees. Saint-Cloud is a beautiful suburb that is built on the sloping, verdant bank of the Seine. It’s clean, spacious, with lots of trees and nice houses. It’s peaceful too, and there’s a great view of Paris in the distance if you walk up to the higher ground. From the top of the footbridge, I could see a hazy Eiffel Tower and the city rising up around its feet. I turned left and noticed a distant Sacré-Coeur and the stick-like water tower beside it. I gazed at it for a while and thought about how far away I was from home.
The passerelle begins high up on the slope of the town and descends gradually to cross the Seine. The Eiffel Tower is perfectly framed at the end of the path, and as you walk along the footbridge, the view gradually disappears until the pointy head is all you can see. The river is wider here and looks more commercial and forceful. There are also rows of houseboats, lined up on either side of the bank. I turned left and could see the skyscrapers of La Défense to the north - Paris’ financial district, a smaller Canary Wharf. As I was reaching the end of the bridge, I looked back at Saint-Cloud behind me and saw that it was a small and beautiful collection of houses and leafy trees. I smiled and advanced into the mighty park.
The great green space is, of course, Le Bois de Boulogne - a legendary European park. It’s two and a half times bigger than Central Park, in New York, slightly larger than Dublin’s Phoenix Park, and just smaller than Richmond Park, in London. The exact size is 2088 acres. Le Bois de Boulogne has a strange and two-faced reputation. On the one hand, it is very classy and often frequented by the Paris elite. Marcel Proust’s narrator mentions going for tea there with Saint-Loup in À la recherche du temps perdu. It is the home of some iconic and exclusive sporting events and locations. There’s the Longchamp racetrack in the west of the park and Roland Garros in the south. On the northern edge, there’s the Fondation Louis Vuitton, which currently has a new David Hockney exhibition that I want to check out.
Other people say that Le Bois de Boulogne is a rather scary place to go to, especially at night. French news often reports that the park is full of prostitutes and drug gangs. When I worked at a film festival two years ago, my boss would tell me stories about his nighttime runs through the park, and passing by caravans full of Brazilian drag queen prostitutes. He said they were great fun and would jog beside him for a little while, offering words of encouragement.
I believe the negative rumours about the park. It makes sense that a bucolic, semi-urban paradise in daytime can turn into a spooky haunt for ne’er-do-wells at night. It’s the same with Hyde Park - or so I’m told by a friend who lives a 5-minute walk from its northern, Lancaster Gate entrance. “Walk through it at your peril,” he said to me dramatically. It’s a long way from any help and there’s not much CCTV.
My hour stroll across the park was the nicest walk I’ve done in a good few weeks. In the Bois de Boulogne, it feels like you have completely left the city and are submerged in pleasant, verdant, almost English countryside. There are great fields, large kingly trees, and bubbling brooks with fleets of tadpoles happily swimming in the shallow water. Paths criss-cross through the trees and there are joggers, dog-walkers, book readers, and the strange folk like me with rucksacks on, smiling and joyfully looking about the place.
It was a quiet, early afternoon and there was heavy birdsong throughout the park. I remember feeling a deep calm and a mellow warmth that only comes from a long, solitary walk.
At last, I exited the park and walked towards Ranelagh metro station. From there, I was set to journey north and east towards another park - Le Bois de Vincennes. I had heard that this is equally beautiful and also surrounded by affluent suburbs.