Rue des Cascades & the Regard Saint-Martin

Why is it significant?

Walk slowly down the quiet, sloping lane and look for a small stone building with a little door and a steep roof, squeezed between two houses. It looks like a tiny chapel, or a hermit's hut. It is in fact a piece of plumbing... one of the oldest in Paris.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Walk slowly down the quiet, sloping lane and look for a small stone building with a little door and a steep roof, squeezed between two houses. It looks like a tiny chapel, or a hermit's hut. It is in fact a piece of plumbing... one of the oldest in Paris.

This is the Regard Saint-Martin, and the word regard means a place to look. Under the hill of Belleville, springs seep out of the rock, and from the Middle Ages the great religious houses of Paris collected that water. Monks of the priory of Saint-Martin-des-Champs, among others, dug stone channels underground to carry it down the hill to their monastery and to the city's fountains. The little stone houses were built over the channels so that the water could be checked, cleaned and kept flowing, with steps leading down to the water itself.

For centuries the springs of Belleville and the neighbouring hills supplied a good part of the drinking water of the Right Bank. Water was everything here, which is why the lane itself is called the Rue des Cascades... the Street of Waterfalls. After rain, water once streamed down the slope in little falls, and the name stuck long after it had all disappeared underground.

There are several regards still standing in Belleville, and a short way down this same street you will find another one, the Regard des Messiers. Its name is thought to come from the messiers, the guards who watched over the crops and vineyards of the hill against thieves before the harvest. Imagine this slope as fields and vines, with a watchman leaning on his stick, and the city a smoky blur far below.

Volunteers and historians still open some of these regards on heritage days, and the underground channels can sometimes be visited with a guide. The rest of the year they stand silent, little stone sentries guarding a water supply nobody uses any more. Now follow the Rue des Cascades downhill to the Rue de Ménilmontant, and turn right towards the great church that towers over the slope.