Explore Rocquencourt

The Arboretum de Versailles-Chèvreloup is a tree collection of the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle covering about 200 hectares beside the park of the Palace of Versailles. Planting began in 1924 on a former royal hunting ground; trees are grouped by botanical family, by region of origin and as garden varieties, and there are greenhouses and a fuchsia garden.

The formal gardens of the Château de Versailles, covering about 800 hectares west of the palace and laid out from the 1660s by André Le Nôtre in the French formal style he perfected there. Parterres, statues, fountains and the Grand Canal are set within a surrounding belt of woodland, bordered by the towns of Versailles and Le Chesnay.

The Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye is a former royal palace west of Paris, rebuilt for Francis I from 1539 around Saint Louis's 13th-century chapel and used by the court until Louis XIV moved to Versailles in 1682. Since 1867 it has housed the Musée d'Archéologie nationale, and its gardens include Le Nôtre's Grande Terrasse above the Seine.

The Louis Vuitton Foundation is an art museum and cultural centre funded by the LVMH group, in a glass-sailed building designed by Frank Gehry. It opened in 2014 next to the Jardin d'Acclimatation in the Bois de Boulogne. The museum shows modern and contemporary art exhibitions across several galleries.

France's national maritime museum, established in 1827 and housed since 1937 in the Palais de Chaillot, overlooking the Seine. Its collection, dating back to a 1748 gift of ship models to Louis XV, covers naval history, model ships, weapons and maritime art. The museum reopened in 2023 after a renovation.

The Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine is an architecture museum in the Palais de Chaillot. Founded in 1879 by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and reopened in its present form in 2007, it displays full-scale plaster casts of French monumental sculpture, including cathedral portals, alongside models of French buildings since 1850.

The Aquarium de Paris is housed partly underground in the Jardins du Trocadéro, facing the Eiffel Tower across the Seine. It holds around 500 species in some forty tanks, including sharks, jellyfish and coral-reef fish. The aquarium also runs a cinema and screens films under the name Cineaqua.

The Guimet Museum is a museum of Asian art on Place d'Iéna, founded by industrialist Émile Guimet, first opened in Lyon in 1879 and moved to Paris in 1889. Its collection covers Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, Tibet, India and Nepal, with sculpture, ceramics and Buddhist art from ancient to medieval periods.

The Arc de Triomphe stands at the centre of Place Charles de Gaulle, at the western end of the Champs-Élysées, commissioned to honour those who fought in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Victories and generals' names are engraved on its surfaces, and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier lies beneath its vault. Stairs lead to a terrace at the top.

A military museum inside the Hôtel des Invalides, a complex Louis XIV ordered built in 1670 to house disabled soldiers. Formed in 1905 from two older collections, it covers military history from antiquity to the Second World War, and its Dome Church holds Napoleon's tomb, completed in 1861, twenty years after his remains returned from Saint Helena.