Buttes Chaumont

The park you are entering stands on a site with a transformation so extreme it remains a marvel of engineering. Before it became a lush landscape, this area was a desolate, jagged wasteland known as a bald hill. For centuries, it served as a gypsum and limestone quarry, the materials from which helped build much of central Paris. By the mid-nineteenth century, the mines were exhausted, leaving behind a scarred, barren landscape that functioned as a public refuse dump and a place for processing animal carcasses. When the city decided to reclaim the land in the eighteen sixties, workers used massive amounts of dynamite to sculpt the rugged cliffs and deep hollows that define the terrain today.