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

The Luxembourg Garden is far more than the prettiest park in Paris — it’s also a way of life. With this VoiceMap tour, you’ll enter the gardens as a visitor, but you’ll soon saunter around them like a local.

While you walk with me, I’ll introduce you to its various elements — historical, natural, sculptural and sporting — while leaving you the freedom to partake as you wish in the lifestyle of the Jardin du Luxembourg. Yes, you may have passed by or even stopped in at all those wonderful pastry shops and stunning churches in the nearby Saint Germain and Latin Quarters, but you can’t truly know the Left Bank until you’ve spent time exploring the gardens’ 62-acres. My goal is to reveal their secrets and history so that you’ll be as at home here as I am as a Parisian.

When the weather’s right, all of Left Bank Paris passes through the Luxembourg Garden. And when the weather’s wrong — well, the weather’s never wrong in the Luxembourg Garden. Here, every sky and each season has its charms.

Along the way, you'll see and hear about:

• Illustrious women
• Mythological drunks
• A jealous cyclops and the queen who admired him
• The birds and the bees and the flowering trees
• A historic apple and pear orchard
• Signs of the German Occupation during WWII
• The patron saint of Paris
• The Paris meridian
• The Statue of Liberty

Though I’ve timed this as a 35-minute walk, I won’t be insulted if you turn me off every now and then to soak in the atmosphere, rest your feet, linger over a view, sit in one of the garden cafés or even nap on one of the inclined chairs.