Regard de la Prise des Eaux du Pré-Saint-Gervais

You are standing before the Regard de la Prise des Eaux, a structure that holds the secret to Paris's medieval water supply. This stone building was the central collection point for an ancient network of underground aqueducts that captured water from the surrounding hills starting in the twelfth century. The monks of the Saint-Lazare leprosarium first built these conduits to bring fresh water to their monastery, long before the city had modern plumbing. What you see today is a seventeenth-century reconstruction of that original site, designed to manage the flow of water with a sophisticated internal distribution system.