Temple de la Sibylle: Buttes-Chaumont's Clifftop Belvedere
Why is it significant?
Catch your breath at the top of the island, beside the little round temple with its ring of slender columns, and look down.
Key Facts
| Place | Temple de la Sibylle: Buttes-Chaumont's Clifftop Belvedere |
|---|---|
| Address | Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, 1 Rue Botzaris, 75019 Paris, France |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.88110, 2.38310 |
| Part of Walk | Rebel Hill: Buttes-Chaumont, Belleville & the Secrets of Père-Lachaise in Paris |
| Generated | Generated |
Catch your breath at the top of the island, beside the little round temple with its ring of slender columns, and look down. Below you a lake curls around the foot of a sheer cliff, footbridges hang over the water, and beyond the trees the rooftops of north-east Paris roll away towards Montmartre and the white domes of the Sacré-Cœur.
It all looks like a romantic mountain landscape, carefully preserved. It is nothing of the sort. Every rock, every slope and every curve of this lake was built by hand in the 1860s, on one of the ugliest pieces of land in Paris. For centuries this hill was a gypsum quarry, dug out for the plaster that coated the walls of the city, the famous plaster of Paris. When the quarry ran out, the holes became a rubbish tip, a place where dead horses were rendered down and where the city's sewage carts emptied their loads.
And a little to the west, on the slope towards the canal, stood something even darker: the gibbet of Montfaucon, the royal gallows of medieval Paris. It was a great stone structure where the bodies of the hanged were left dangling in the wind for weeks, as a warning to anyone approaching the city. For the poor of the north-east, this whole district smelled of death.
Then Napoleon the Third and his prefect Baron Haussmann decided that working-class Paris deserved a park as grand as the ones in the west. The engineer Adolphe Alphand and his team blasted, sculpted and replanted the old quarry, brought in topsoil by the cartload, and dug the lake. The park opened in 1867, just in time for that year's Universal Exhibition. The architect Gabriel Davioud crowned the rock with this temple, a copy of the ancient Temple of the Sibyl at Tivoli near Rome.
To get up here you probably crossed the narrow stone bridge onto the island. Parisians long ago nicknamed it the Suicide Bridge... which tells you something about the melancholy of a cliff in the middle of a city. Now go back down the winding path towards the eastern shore of the lake, and look for a dark opening in the rock, with the sound of falling water inside.