The Left Bank's Most Elegant Park: Exploring The Luxembourg Garden

Paris's Luxembourg Garden isn't just a park – it's a way of life for the Left Bank locals who treat it as their living room. On this walking tour, you'll explore 400 years of history, from Marie de Medici's royal ambitions to the Liberation of Paris. You'll also discover the garden's surprising mix of beehives, rare fruit trees, and a miniature Statue of Liberty.

The tour starts just inside the garden's gold-spiked entrance, near a small kiosk with a map of the grounds. You'll pass the Medici Fountain, the oldest remnant of the original royal garden, built in 1630 and depicting the cyclops Polyphemus in a jealous rage. From there, you'll climb to a terrace offering a long formal view to the dome of the Pantheon, lined with 20 statues of Queens of France and Illustrious Women carved in the 1840s.

Descending to the central water basin, you'll learn about the Paris Meridian, the longitudinal line France stubbornly refused to abandon until 1911, which passes directly through this spot. The tour winds through horse chestnut alleys, past pétanque courts, a historic beekeeping school dating to 1856, and an orchard conserving 600 varieties of espaliered apple and pear trees. The tour ends at the Luxembourg Museum, which hosts temporary exhibitions alongside the garden's exit.

On this 35-minute tour, you'll have a chance to:

• Examine the Medici Fountain's mythological scene, depicting the cyclops Polyphemus about to crush his rival in jealousy
• Spot bullet pockmarks on the Luxembourg Palace walls, where fierce street fighting erupted during the Liberation of Paris in August 1944
• See a bronze replica of the Statue of Liberty, paired with an American oak planted in memory of the September 11 victims
• Watch children sail wooden toy boats on the grand central basin, a tradition stretching back to the 1600s
• Identify sculptures by Ossip Zadkine, whose studio a block away is now a dedicated museum
• Admire the 1869 orangery greenhouse that shelters the garden's exotic boxed citrus and palm trees each winter

The Luxembourg Garden rewards slow walkers most of all – bring a book and claim one of those famous green Senate chairs.