A Quick Orientation Guide of Paris

Paris, is not only a city, but also one of the 95 departments that make up mainland France. Long after the last stone wall around the city came down, the city and department limits of Paris are marked by a more modern barrier. It is the ring road called the Boulevard Périphérique, or as locals say, le Périph’, 35km long and 35m wide, built between 1956 and 1973, that now separates Paris from its suburbs, la banlieue.

Within these city limits, the Seine river, flowing in an inversed U-shape through the city, splits Paris into a Right Bank (to the north) and a Left Bank (to the south). The Right Bank houses the business districts, the Champs Élysées, the Louvre, and Montmartre, while the Left Bank is home to the Latin Quarter with the Sorbonne University, the Musée d’Orsay, and the Eiffel Tower.

Administratively, Paris is split up into 20 districts, arrondissements, that each have their own town hall and their own mayor. They are numbered from 1 to 20, spiraling outward from the center like a snail’s shell. The Louvre is in the first district, Notre Dame in the fourth, the Sorbonne in the fifth, the Eiffel Tower in the seventh, the Champs Élysées in the eighth, the Opéra Garnier in the ninth, and so on.

If you want to know in which arrondissement you are, just look at a street sign!

The woods Bois de Boulogne to the west and Bois de Vincennes to the east, while outside the snail shell and the Périph’, belong to the city of Paris.

The business district of La Défense, on the western end of the prolongation of the Champs Élysées, on the other hand, does not. It is located in the department Hauts-de-Seine.

Fun fact about the districts: When the city grew beyond its then 12 districts in 1860, the rich western parts of the city (now the 6th district) didn’t want to become number 13. Beyond the obvious superstition, there was another reason: At the time, the expression “getting married at the town hall of the 13th district” meant living together “in sin”, as there was no 13th district with a town hall to get married in. The rich people of the west did not wish to be associated with such a repugnant idea.

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