page_title: History of parks and gardens of Paris
section_title: Parc des Buttes Chaumont (1864–1867)
hierarchical_section_title: History of parks and gardens of Paris / Parks and gardens of Napoleon III (1852–1870) / Parc des Buttes Chaumont (1864–1867)
caption_attribution_description: Parc des Buttes Chaumont
context_page_description: Paris today has more than 421 municipal parks and gardens, covering more than three thousand hectares and containing more than 250,000 trees. Two of Paris's oldest and most famous gardens are the Tuileries Garden, created in 1564 for the Tuileries Palace, and redone by André Le Nôtre in 1664; and the Luxembourg Garden, belonging to a château built for Marie de' Medici in 1612, which today houses the French Senate. The Jardin des Plantes was the first botanical garden in Paris, created in 1626 by Louis XIII's doctor Guy de La Brosse for the cultivation of medicinal plants. Between 1853 and 1870, the Emperor Napoleon III and the city's first director of parks and gardens, Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand, created the Bois de Boulogne, the Bois de Vincennes, Parc Montsouris and the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, located at the four points of the compass around the city, as well as many smaller parks, squares and gardens in the neighborhoods of the city. One hundred sixty-six new parks have been created since 1977, most notably the Parc de la Villette and Parc André Citroën.
context_section_description: The Parc des Buttes Chaumont, twenty-seven hectares in size in the north of the city, was an unpromising site for a garden; The soil was very poor, and the land bare of vegetation; its original name was "Chauvre-mont" or "bald hill." In medieval times, it was close the site of the gibbet, where the corpses of excited criminals were displayed. From 1789 it served as a sewage dump, and much of the site had been used as a stone quarry
  Alphand began to build in 1864. Two years and one thousand workers were required simply to terrace the site and to bring in two hundred thousand square meters of topsoil. A small railroad line was built to carry the earth. Gunpowder was used to blast the rock, and to sculpt the 50-meter-high central promontory. A two hectare lake was dug at the foot of the promontory. Alphand laid out five kilometers of paths and roads, and Belgrand installed pumps and pipes to hoist water from the Ourq canal to supply the cascades and lake and water the new gardens. Davioud designed a grotto, using the tunnels of the old stone quarry; a circular temple, based on the Temple of Vesta, Tivoli, to crown the promontory, as well as four bridges to span the lake. The park opened on April 1, 1867, the opening day of the Paris Universal Exposition.
  An urban legend says that bodies of Communards killing during the suppression of the 1871 Paris Commune are entombed inside the old stone quarries in the Promentory. In fact 754 bodies were placed there briefly for a short time after the fighting ended, but were buried in the city cemeteries soon afterwards.
caption: The lawns of the Parc des Buttes Chaumont on a sunny day
exif: {"Image Make": "NIKON CORPORATION", "Image Model": "NIKON D200", "Image XResolution": "240", "Image YResolution": "240", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Ver.1.00", "Image DateTime": "2007:04:23 14:03:19", "Image ExifOffset": "186", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/125", "EXIF FNumber": "28/5", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Aperture Priority", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "100", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2007:04:22 16:38:59", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2007:04:22 16:38:59", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "870723/125000", "EXIF ApertureValue": "2485427/500000", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "3", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire", "EXIF FocalLength": "24", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "16", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "16", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF CVAPattern": "[2, 0, 2, 0, 1, 0, 2, 1]", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "1", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "36", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF GainControl": "None", "EXIF Contrast": "Normal", "EXIF Saturation": "Hard", "EXIF Sharpness": "Hard", "EXIF SubjectDistanceRange": "0"}