Tour Saint-Jacques rises 52 metres above a small park in central Paris, the lone survivor of a church demolished during the Revolution. The tower began life in 1508 as the bell tower of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie, Saint James of the Butchery, named for the marshy ground where local butchers once plied their trade.

For centuries, pilgrims gathered here before setting off on the 1,450-kilometre walk to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Some still do. When revolutionaries sold the church for scrap in 1797, the tower found unlikely new employment as a shot tower, with molten lead dropped from the top to form ammunition. Blaise Pascal conducted his famous barometric experiments here, and a statue of the physicist now stands at its base.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours trace the tower's connections to the medieval pilgrimage routes, the Catacombs where its churchyard's dead were relocated, and the butchers' quarter that gave it such an unspiritual name.