Paris Sewer Museum

The Musée des Égouts de Paris, or Paris Sewer Museum, sits directly beneath the pavement near the Pont de l’Alma. You can identify the entrance by the structures near the esplanade Habib-Bourguiba, where a doorway leads down into the city's active subterranean sanitation network. This museum is a functional part of the infrastructure designed in the nineteenth century by engineer Eugène Belgrand. While many visitors walk the streets above, this site provides a rare perspective on the massive, vaulted galleries that have kept the capital clean since the late fourteenth century, when Hugues Aubriot first began the city's organized drainage efforts.