Promenade Plantee and Around
From Paris Hotels Reviews
Promenade Plantee and Around
The Promenade Plantée (Mº Bastille/Ledru-Rollin), also known as the Coulė Verte, is an excellent way to see a little-visited part of the city – and from an unusual angle. This disused railway viaduct, part of the old Paris-Cherbourg line, has been ingeniously converted into an elevated walkway and planted with a profusion of trees and flowers – cherry trees, maples, limes, roses and lavender. The walkway starts near the beginning of avenue Daumesnil, just south of the Bastile opera house, and is reached via a flight of stone steps – of lifts – with a number of similar access points further along. It takes you to the Parc de Reuilly then descends to ground level and continues nearly as far as the pėriphėrique, from where you can follow signs to the Bois de Vincennes. Plans are afoot to extend the promenade so that it takes you directly to the Bois. The whole walk is around 4.5km long, but if you don't feel like doing the entire thing you could just walk the first part, along the viaduct – a twenty-minute stroll – which also happens to be the most attractive stretch, running past venerable old mansion blocks and giving you a bird's-eye view of the street below. Small architectural details such as decorative mouldings and elaborate wrought-iron balconies that you wouldn't-icon balconies that you wouldn't normally notice at street level come to light – the oddest sight is the series of caryatids adorning the police station at the end of the avenue Daumesnil.
Underneath, the red-brick arches of the viaduct itself have been converted into attractive spaces for artisans' studios and craft shops, collectively known as the Viaduc des Arts. The workshops house a wealth of creativity: furniture and tapestry restorers, interior designers, cabinet-makers, violin – and flute-makers, embroiderers and fashion and jewellery designers. The viaduct ends around halfway down avenue Daumesnil, but the Promenade Plantėe continues, taking you to the Jardin de Reuilly, an old freight station, now an inviting, circular expanse of lawn, popular with picnickers on sunny days, and bordered by terraces and arbours. The open-air cafė here makes a good refreshment halt if you're walking the length of the promenade. You can also choose to bypass the park altogether by taking the gratefully arching wooden footbridge that spans it. The next part of the walkway – the allėe Vivaldi – is a rather nondescript road lined with modern blocks, but then you enter a tunnel and emerge at the other end in the old railway cutting, a delightful strectch that meaders through a canopy of trees and flowers, below the level of the surrounding streets. At this point the path divides into two – one for pedestrians, the other for cyclists – landscaped all along, taking you through a series of ivy-draped, ex-railway tunnels and shadowing the rue du Sahel for most of the way. The walk comes to an end at the boulevard pėriphėrique. Take the wrought-iron spiral staircase up to road level, turn right onto the ring boulevard de la Guyane, and a short walk along here will eventually bring you to the Bois de Vincennes and the Porte Dorėe mėtro station (turn right onto avenue Daumesnil at the end of boulevard de la Guyane and the mėtro station is a five-minute walk along the avenue).
