Paris mosque and Jardin des Plantes
France > Paris > Left Bank > Quartier Latin > Jardin des Plantes

Jardin des plantes

A little further east from rue Mouffetard, across rue Monge, lie some of the city's most agreeable surprises. Just beyond Place du Puits de l'Ermite stand the gate and crenellated walls of the Paris mosque (daily except Fri & Muslim holidays 9am–noon & 2–6pm; €3). You can walk in the sunken garden and patios with their polychrome tiles and carved ceilings, but non-Muslims are asked not to enter the prayer room – though no-one seems to mind if you watch from a discreet distance during prayers. The gate on the southeast corner of the complex, on rue Daubenton, leads into a lovely tearoom with a garden, and an atmospheric hammam.

Behind the mosque, the Jardin des Plantes (daily: summer 7.30am–8pm; winter 8am–dusk; free; www.mnhn.fr; M° Austerlitz/Jussieu/Monge) was founded as a medicinal herb garden in 1626. It gradually evolved as Paris's botanical gardens and with hothouses, shady avenues of trees, lawns to sprawl on, museums and a zoo, it's a pleasant oasis in which to while away a few hours. There's an entrance at the corner of rues Geoffroy-St-Hilaire and Buffon, alongside the museum shop selling wonderful books and postcards; other entrances are further north on the corner with rue Cuvier, the main gate on rue Cuvier itself, and on quai St-Bernard. If you enter by the rue Cuvier entrance, you'll get to see a fine cedar of Lebanon planted in 1734, raised from seed sent over from the Oxford Botanical Gardens, and a slice of an American sequoia more than 2000 years old. In the nearby physics labs, Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity in 1896, and two years later the Curies discovered radium (Pierre ended his days under the wheels of a brewer's dray on rue Dauphine).

Magnificent, varied floral beds make a fine approach to the collection of buildings that form the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle. Skip the musty museums of paleontology, anatomy, mineralogy, entomology and paleobotany in favour of the Grande Galerie de l'Évolution, (daily except Tues 10am–6pm, Thurs till 10pm; €6.10), housed in a dramatically restored nineteenth-century glass-domed building (the entrance is off rue Buffon). You can't fail to be wowed by the sheer scale of the interior, where the story of evolution and the relations between human beings and nature is told with the aid of stuffed animals (rescued from the dusty old zoology museum and restored to such spruceness that they look alive) and a combination of clever lighting effects, ambient music and birdsong, videos and touch-screen databases. If you really want to do something as old-fashioned as reading, there are wooden lecture boards in English to accompany the aurals and visuals. On the lower level, submarine light suffuses the space where the murkiest deep-ocean creatures are displayed. Above, glass lifts rise silently from the savannah, where a closely packed line of huge African animals, headed by an elephant, look as if they're stepping onto Noah's ark. It's all great fun for children, and there's even a small interactive centre for kids on the first floor.

Live animals can be seen in the small ménagerie across the park to the northeast near rue Cuvier (summer Mon–Sat 9.30am–6pm, Sun 9.30am–6.30pm; winter daily 9.30am–5pm; €6). Founded here just after the Revolution, it is France's oldest zoo – and looks it. The old-fashioned iron cages of the big cats' fauverie, the stinky vivarium and the unkempt, glazed-in primate house are frankly depressing, though these animals will at least be spared the fate of their predecessors during the starvation months of the 1870 Prussian siege. Thankfully, most of the rest of the zoo is pleasantly park-like and given over to deer, antelope, goats, buffaloes and other marvellous beasts that seem happy enough in their outdoor enclosures. In the Microzoo you can inspect headlice and other minuscule wonders through a microscope.

A short distance away to the northwest, with entrances in rue de Navarre, rue des Arènes and another through a passage on rue Monge, is the Arènes de Lutèce. It's an unexpected backwater hidden from the street, and, along with the Roman baths, Paris's only Roman remains. A few ghostly rows of stone seats are all that's left of an amphitheatre that once sat ten thousand; the entertainment now provided by the old men playing boules in the sand below. Benches, gardens and a kids' playground stand behind.