Trocadéro and the Septième
France > Paris > Trocadero & 7eme

Map of Trocadero, Eiffel Tower & 7eme

Trocadero

From the terrace of the Palais de Chaillot on place du Trocadéro, as you look out across the river to the Eiffel Tower and École Militaire, or let your gaze run from the ornate 1900 Pont Alexandre III along the grassy Esplanade to the Hôtel des Invalides, the vistas are splendid. This is town planning on a grand scale, upstaging the minor interests and details of everyday lives. In the shadow of this giant riverside landscape, the Septième arrondissement (7^e) runs east along the Left Bank towards St-Germain, populated with endless ministries, embassies and luxurious official residences.

But for all the pomp, corners of more amenable life do exist – in rue de Babylone, and in the streets between the Invalides and the Champ de Mars – and there's a host of excellent museums, particularly for nineteenth and twentieth-century art. First among them is the unmissable Musée d'Orsay with its unrivalled collection of Impressionist paintings. Elsewhere you'll find museums devoted to modern and contemporary art, sewers, anthropology, war, Asian art, the sculptors Rodin and Maillol and, in the near future, architecture and primitive art. But of all the mega-monuments in the area, the best is undoubtedly the Eiffel Tower. No matter how many pictures, photos, models or glimpses from elsewhere in the city you may have seen, it is still, when you get up close, an amazing structure.