Forum des Halles
Ce point d’intérêt est disponible en audio dans le circuit: Visit Paris, From the Mona Lisa to the Notre-Dame Cathedral
You’re now walking past the Forum des Halles. This huge shopping center is one of the busiest in all of France, drawing in a whopping 150,000 people a day – that’s a staggering 50 million visitors a year! That’s about 5 times more than the Louvre! Back in the late 60s, the city’s central market, the one described in Émile Zola’s novel “The Belly of Paris,” relocated to Rungis, leaving a huge empty space right in the center of town. This was a golden opportunity to revamp the area and launch a major urban project to breathe new life into the right riverbank. The plan was to build what could only be described as an underground city. They’d connect public transport with shopping malls and sports and leisure facilities, and create the biggest transport hub connecting the subway and RER at Les Halles. Nineteen years later, Jacques Chirac, the Mayor of Paris at the time, cut the ribbon on the Forum des Halles, home to 190 stores. The Forum you see today, topped by this gigantic dome, is the result of a major renovation in 2002, as the original structure was in ruins and no longer very popular. Well, hope you like it, because it cost a whopping 918 million euros! Needless to say, it caused quite a stir!
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