香榭丽舍大道

The Champs-Élysées began not as a grand thoroughfare, but as a marshy stretch of vegetable gardens and scrubland on the edge of the city. In the early seventeenth century, Queen Marie de Medici decided to clear these fields to create a simple, tree-lined promenade for her own recreation. It was only later in that century that the royal landscape architect Andre Le Notre transformed the humble path into a formal extension of the Tuileries Garden, laying the foundation for the sweeping, symmetrical axis you see today.