Paris mosque and Jardin des Plantes
From Paris Hotels Reviews
The Paris mosque and Jardin des Plantes
East of rue Moffetard, across rue Monge, lie some of the city’s most agreeable surprises. Just beyond place du Puits de L’Ermite stand the gate and crenellated walls of the Paris mosque (daily except Fri & Muslim holidays 9am-noon & 2-6pm; €3; M° Jussieu), which was built by Morocan craftsmen in the early 1920s. You’re free to walk from cloister to tiled cloister, admiring the sunken garden, but non-Muslim are asked not to enter the prayer room. No-one seems to mind, however, if you watch from a discreet distance during prayers. Towards the back of the building, on the rue Geoffroy St-Hilaire side, lies a simple monument to the Algerian scholar and national her Abd el-Kader, who led the resistance against French invasion before finally being forced to surrender in 1847. The gate on the southest corner of the mosque complex, on rue Daubenton, leads into a lovely tearoom with a garden (see p. 338), and an atmospheric hamman.
Behind the mosque, the Jardin des Plantes (daily: April-Aug 7:30am-8am; Sept-March 8am-dusk; free; www.mnhh.fr; M° Austerlitz/Jussieu/Monge) was founded as a medicinal herb garden in 1626 and retains a scientific botanical role. It has always had another, more leisured side, however, and its hothouses, shady avenues of trees, lawns, museums and zoo make it a favourite oasis for Parisians. There’s an entrance at the cormer of rues Geoffroy-St-Hilaire and Buffon; other entrances are further north on the corner with rue Cuvier; the main gate on rue Cuvier itself, and quai St-Bernard. If you enter by the rue Cuvier gate and climb the little hillock on the right up to an ironwork gazebo, you can then descend alog pleasant winding paths past a stately cedar of Lebanon planted in 1734; keep straight ahead on the main path leading from the gate and you’ll pass some fine plane trees a mere half-century younger. In the nearby physics labs overlooking the gardens, Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity in 1896, and two years later the Curies discovered radium.
Magnificient, varied floral beds make a fine approach to the collection of buildings that form the Muséum National d’ Historie Naturelle. Skip the musty museums of paleontology, anatomy, mineralogy, entomology and paleobotany in favour of the Grande Galerie de l’Evolution (daily expect Tues 10am-6pm; €8), housed in a dramatically restored nineteenth-cenruty glass-domed building (the entrance is off rue Buffon). You can’t fail to be wowed by the sheer scale of the interior, where the story of evolution and the relations between human beings and nature is told with the aid of suffed animals (rescued fro, the dusty old zoology museum and restored to such spruceness that they look alive) and combination of clever lighting effects, ambient music and birdsong, videos and touch-screen databases. If you really want to do something as old-fashioned as reading, there are wooden olecture boards in English to accompany the aureals and visuals. On the lower level, submarine light suffuses the space where the murkiest deep-ocean creatures are displayed. Above, glass lifts rise silently from the savannah, where a closely packed line of huge African animals, headed by an elephant, look as if they’re stepping onto Moah’s ark. It’s great fun for children, and there’s even a small interactive centre for kids on the first floor.
Live animals can be seen in the small menagerie across the park to the northeast near rue Cuvier (summer Mon-Sat 9am-6pm, Sun 9:30am-6:30pm; winter daily 9am-5pm; €7). Founded just after the Revolution, it is France’s oldest zoo – and looks it. The old-fashioned iron cages of the big cats’ fanverie, the stinky vivarium and the unkempt, glazed-in primate house are frankly depressing, though these animals will atleast be spared the fate of their predecessors during the starvation months of the 1870 Prussian siege. Thankfully, most of the rest of the zoo is pleasantly park-like and given over to deer, antelope, goats, buffaloes and other marvelous beasts that seem happy enough in their outdoor enclosures. In the Microzoo you can inspect headlice and other minuscule wonders through a microscope.
The surprisingly large – and remarkably well-hidden – open space of the Arénes de Lutéce lies a short distance away to the northwest, with entrances in rue de Navarre, rue des Arenas and another through a passage on rue Monge. A few ghostly rows of stone seats are all that’s left of the Roman amphitheatre that once amused ten thousand here; the entertainment is now provided by the old men playing boules in the sand below. Benches, gardens and a kids’ playground stand behind.
