Coulée verte René-Dumont (Promenade Plantée)

Park · Bastille to Reuilly, along avenue Daumesnil (12th)Paris,France

A four-and-a-half-kilometre park along a disused Paris railway, its first stretch running ten metres up on a viaduct level with first-floor windows.

The Coulée verte René-Dumont is a park laid along the top of a disused railway. The first stretch is the one people come for: it sits on a brick viaduct about ten metres up, so you walk level with the first-floor windows of the flats on either side. Roses climb over steel arches, bamboo screens the noise, and there are pools and benches at intervals. Below your feet the arches of the viaduct have been glazed and rented out to craft workshops. Further east the walk drops to ground level, runs through a cutting and a short tunnel, and gets quieter with every kilometre, ending four and a half kilometres out at the edge of the woods. Trains ran from a station at Bastille to the eastern suburbs from 1859 until the line closed in 1969. The station came down and an opera house went up in its place, but the track bed was left empty and the city planted it rather than building on it. The park opened in 1993, the first in the world made on a disused railway viaduct, sixteen years before New York did the same with the High Line.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The start is easy to walk past — The stair up onto the viaduct is on avenue Daumesnil just behind the opera house, set into the brickwork with no sign to mark it.
The character changes every few hundred metres — The raised brick section, the cutting, the tunnel and the garden stretches feel like four different parks joined end to end.
You are looking into people's homes — The viaduct runs level with first-floor windows on both sides, so keep a camera pointed along the walk rather than sideways.
The rose arches flower in late May and June — Outside those weeks the raised section is mostly green: bamboo, climbers and clipped hedge, with lavender through high summer.
Getting up is by stairs almost everywhere — Step-free entries onto the raised section exist at only a few points, so anyone with a wheelchair or a pushchair should work out where to get up before setting off.

Things to do

1
Walk the viaduct at window height
Start behind the opera house and take the stair up onto the viaduct. For the first kilometre and a half you are level with the first-floor windows of the flats on both sides, close enough to see bookshelves and kitchen tables. Most of those windows have no curtains, because the people living behind them have had decades to get used to walkers going past.
2
Look into the workshops from the pavement below
Come down at any point and walk the same stretch again at street level, on the workshop side. Each glazed arch is a workshop with the job in progress turned towards the glass: a chair stripped back to its frame, the front of a violin held in clamps, a gilder's brushes laid out. What is on show is the work being done, rather than a shop window of finished pieces.
3
Carry on east where most people turn back
Most people turn back at the end of the viaduct. Carry on east instead: the walk drops into a cutting between stone walls, goes through a short tunnel, crosses a garden on a footbridge and comes out among rose arches and small gardens. The last stretch reaches the woods and is almost empty.