Parc des Buttes-Chaumont

The Parc des Buttes-Chaumont is defined by its dramatic, hilly terrain and a rocky central island that rises fifty meters above an artificial lake. This landscape, which opened in eighteen sixty-seven, occupies a site once known as the "chauve-mont," or bare hill. Before it became a public space for the residents of the nineteenth arrondissement, the area functioned as a gypsum quarry and, for centuries, served as the location for the Gibbet of Montfaucon, where the bodies of executed criminals were displayed to the public.