Saturday Walk #1 – Garden of the Auteuil Greenhouses, Bois de Boulogne and Beaugrenelle

For a few months now, we have established a little weekly tradition, the Saturday walk. Every week, except during confinement of course, we discover a part of Paris that we don’t know very well yet or that we want to rediscover. Today I will share with you our walk from the the Garden of the Auteuil Grenhouses to Beaugrenelle.

I’ve always dreamed of writing a blog. A real one. But my problem, which is quite blocking when you want to blog, is regularity. So I thought that in order to write articles regularly, I need to capitalize on what I already have, hence the idea of sharing my Saturday walks with you!

Why the Saturday walks?

One of my biggest passions is local tourism, and how it is possible to travel on a daily basis without having to leave your city. One of the foundations of this practice is the constant rediscovery of our environment. Very often, we don’t really know our city, and the surroundings of it even less.

I say that, but actually I’m not perfect at it, because there are a lot of places in Paris that I don’t know very well yet. But this is normal, because we all explore our surroundings according to our interests and opportunities that are offered to us.

For a long time now, there has been a number of places that I have wanted to discover in Paris and I have a very long list of places to see in my head. But as it often happens with to-do lists, we never complete them. That’s why, in September, we started devoting on Saturday (or occasionally Sunday) to walks all over Paris and beyond.

As one of my wishes with The Morning Walk is to help you travel locally, I will share my walks with you in hopes that they will be an inspiration for your own walks!

We start this week with the first #SaturdayWalk which will take us from Molitor to Beaugrenelle. I was very creative on the name of this cycle, haven’t I? 😉

Here is the outline of our walk:

Voir en plein écran

Throwback walk

This week’s walk is a bit of a throwback walk, because I went to see the building where I did my prep school and where I spent two (very long) years. I was amazed to see that on the one hand, everything had remained the same while on the other everything had changed!

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The Lycée Claude Bernard, originally a boys’ school, was built in 1938 by Gustave Umbdenstock, who also built the Caroussel Bridge and remodeled the Hotel Bristol, both in Paris.

After spending a little time remembering this period of my life, we continued between two stadiums : the Parc des Princes (home to the PSG team) and the Stade Jean Bouin, which was under construction when I was in prep school. In rue Nungesser et Colie we saw the Apartment-Atelier of Corbusier and several astonishing buildings, like this green mosaic building.

We also went to take a look at Hotel Le Molitor, which is now managed by the Accor Group, where I worked for several years, and which I had never seen for real! All yellow (my favorite color), it houses one of the prettiest swimming pools in Paris, built in 1929 and renovated in 2014. Of all the hotels that I discovered on the group’s websites during my brief time at Accor, this one is my favorite. I can’t wait to see its interior in real life one day (maybe this year?).

The Garden of the Auteuil Greenhouses

Quite quickly, we came across the entrance to the Garden of the Auteuil Greenhouses (Jardin des Serres d’Auteuil in French). I have to admit that this was absolutely not planned, even though this park had been on my mental list of places to see for a long time. Inside the garden’s wonders took our breath away!

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The Garden of the Auteuil Greenhouses is one of the 4 parks of the Botanical Garden of Paris and it was redeveloped at the end of the 19th century by Jean Camille Formigé. One of its specificities is the turquoise color of the cast iron greenhouses. I was impressed by the palmarium, rising to 15 meters. I was also surprised and by the Simonne Mathieu tennis court, which is an extension of Roland Garros that we can hardly guess behind a modern greenhouse.

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If you plan to go there, take a break in the sun on a bench on the side of the main garden. At noon, you can even have lunch there and enjoy a very practical small table for a picnic. For us, it was the first of the year!

The Bois De Boulogne

After our lunch, we left by the main entranceof the Garden and we followed a small alley all the way to the Bois de Boulogne. It was very astonishing to walk over the ring road, the “périphérique” in French, and apart from the lack of pedestrian crossing, I must admit that the path was quite comfortable for walkers!

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We had a very nice walk in the Bois de Boulogne, although contrary to what I am showing you on these photos, there were a lot of people. But like in many places, as soon as we turned into a small alley, we were alone with the trees. Personally, I really like trees in winter, when you can see the twisty shape of their branches.

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We left the Bois de Boulogne and headed towards Ranelagh. On the way, we saw the small square dedicated to the Combattant Writers who Died for FranceDes and the very pretty buildings surround it.

Ranelagh

The district of Ranelagh is named after an 18th century English Lord, who built a garden around his Ranelagh House in London, which was very popular. This garden inspired the creators of the Parisian garden, which they decided to name after the London garden.

The garden surprised us with its crowd, even though it is very close to the Bois de Boulogne! We walked through it pretty quickly, not taking the time to explore it properly because it was already getting late.

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We did take a quick look at an unusual element on rue de Beauséjour, the are Russian houses, called also the “isbas”. They are located at 7 rue de Beauséjour and we can get a glimpse of them through the gate. They were installed there after the World’s Fair of 1867.

We then started our way to Beaugrenelle through the 16th arrondissement.

Towards Beaugrenelle

We finished our walk towards Beaugrenelle through the 16th arrondissement, passing through the streets rue de L’Assomption and rue Boulainvilliers and on our way, we saw some very beautiful details!

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For me, the details of the buildings are as important as the architecture itself! I really like to look for them and notice them when I walk through Paris.

Come to think of it, I have the impression that the further we went towards Beaugrenelle, the more original the architecture became … which I enjoyed very much!

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As surprising as it may seem, in the last building there is a SPA and not a bunker 😉! As some may know, I really like buildings that are commonly considered ugly so I was very happy.

We ended the walk by passing over the Pont de Grenelle, we greeted the back of the Parisian Statue of Liberty and I enjoyed the view (and the cold) of one of my favorite neighborhoods.

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In total we did more than 18,000 steps and almost 15 kilometers for a fairly busy afternoon.

If you enjoyed this walk and you want to follow our footsteps, don’t hesitate to take a look at the map I inserted at the beginning of the article!

If you want other inspirations for walks, you can follow me on instagram here and on facebook here.

I wish you a very nice day, I encourage you as always to discover your city and we will meet again soon for another Saturday walk!