Explore Saint-Germain-en-Laye

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 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.

A Neoclassical château on the Versailles estate, built between 1762 and 1768 to a design by Ange-Jacques Gabriel for Louis XV's mistress, Madame de Pompadour, on the site of an earlier botanical garden. Louis XVI later gave it to his wife, Marie Antoinette, who used it as a private retreat away from the formality of the main palace.

A single-storey château in pink marble and stone at the northwestern edge of the Versailles estate, built from 1687 by Jules Hardouin-Mansart as a retreat for Louis XIV away from the strict etiquette of court. It replaced an earlier porcelain-tiled pavilion on the same site and stands beside its own park, which includes the Petit Trianon.

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 Palace of Versailles is a former royal château in the Yvelines department, southwest of Paris. Built up from a hunting lodge under Louis XIV, it served as the principal residence of the French kings from 1682 until the French Revolution and houses the Hall of Mirrors. It now anchors an estate that also includes the gardens and the Trianon palaces.

The Jardin d'Acclimatation is a 19-hectare amusement park in the northern Bois de Boulogne, opened in 1860 by Napoleon III as a zoological and acclimatisation garden where plants and animals from French colonies were studied. It has operated as a family leisure park since the 1930s, with rides, gardens and a farm, and borders the Fondation Louis Vuitton.

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.

A tennis complex in south-west Paris, built in 1928 and named after the World War I aviator Roland Garros, who made the first solo flight across the Mediterranean Sea. It hosts the French Open each May and June on clay courts, with twenty courts in total including Court Philippe Chatrier, Court Suzanne Lenglen and Court Simonne Mathieu.

Musée Marmottan Monet is an art museum on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, in a former hunting lodge bought by Jules Marmottan in 1882 and bequeathed with his son Paul's collection to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1932. It opened in 1934 and holds over 300 Impressionist works, mainly Monet, after a 1966 donation by his son Michel.

The Maison de Balzac is a writer's house museum at 47 Rue Raynouard in Passy, the only surviving residence of novelist Honoré de Balzac. He rented its ground-floor apartment from 1840 to 1847 under a false name while hiding from creditors, and wrote much of La Comédie humaine there. The city of Paris acquired the house in 1949.

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.