page_title: History of parks and gardens of Paris
section_title: Parc Montsouris (1865–1878)
hierarchical_section_title: History of parks and gardens of Paris / Parks and gardens of Napoleon III (1852–1870) / Parc Montsouris (1865–1878)
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Palais du Bardo - Paris, Parc Montsouris (France)&#160;; carte postale
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: Parc Montsouris was the last of the four large parks created by Napoleon III at the four cardinal points of the compass around Paris. It was precisely south of the exact center of Paris- a monument in the park placed by Napoleon I indicated the prime meridian which French maps used until 1911, instead of Greenwich, as the zero degree of longitude. Napoleon III decreed to construction of the park in 1865, but purchasing the land took time, and work did not begin until 1867. Work was also delayed because several hundred corpses that had been placed in the catacombs of Paris, part of which lay under the park, had to be moved. The park was inaugurated in 1869, but was not actually finished until 1878, under Alphand, who continued his work as the Director of Public Works of Paris under the French Third Republic.
  Parc Montsouris, 15.5 hectares in area, had all the elements of a classical Second Empire garden in a smaller space; a lake, a cascade, winding paths, a cafe, a guignol theater, lawns and flower beds. It also had a remarkable folly: the Palais de Bardo, a reduced-scale replica of the summer residence of the beys of Tunis, which had originally been part of the Paris Universal Exposition of 1867. Made of wood and stucco, it was installed in the center of the park, where it served as a weather station, but gradually suffered from vandalism and neglect. It burned down in 1991, and was not replaced.
caption: The Palais de Bardo was a landmark of Parc Montsouris until burned down in 1991
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