From the Iron Tower to the Royal Garden: A First Walk Through Paris

Paris rewards a walk that keeps to the river's side. This one starts at the tower that was never meant to last, crosses the green parade ground at its foot, passes the golden dome where Napoleon lies, and then follows the Left Bank to a railway station turned museum. A footbridge leads to the garden where the royal city grew, and the walk ends at the obelisk that closes the view.

Six stops, all of them seen from outside.

The Eiffel Tower was built as the showpiece of the 1889 Exposition Universelle, on a permit of twenty years. After that it was supposed to come down. Gustave Eiffel saved it by making it useful: the summit became a station for weather and aerodynamics experiments, and then for the young science of radio. Stand underneath before you leave and look straight up through the ironwork. It is the view that explains why people argued about it.

The long lawn at the foot of the tower is the Champ de Mars, named after the Campus Martius of ancient Rome, the field where Roman soldiers trained. The Paris one was laid out as a parade ground for the military school at its far end, and it was the site of the 1889 Exposition for which the tower was raised. Walk its whole length away from the tower, and turn round now and then: the view gets better each time.

The golden dome ahead belongs to the church of the Hôtel des Invalides. Louis XIV founded the complex in 1670 as a home for wounded soldiers, and Napoleon's tomb lies under the dome, in a sarcophagus at the centre of an open crypt that you look down into. Stand in front of the long façade first and take in its scale, then decide whether to go in.

From the esplanade, follow the river downstream to the Musée d'Orsay. It began as a railway station, a Beaux-Arts terminus opened in 1900 for that year's Exposition Universelle, and in 1986 became a museum of French art from 1848 to 1914. Look at the station before the art: the great arched hall and the big clock are the ones travellers used. Our data gives the hours as 09:30 to 18:00, to 21:45 on Thursdays, and closed on Mondays.

On the far bank lies the Tuileries Garden, one of the oldest gardens in the city. Catherine de' Medici had a palace and an Italian-style garden laid out here in 1564, on ground named after its tile works. A century later Le Nôtre, whose father and grandfather had gardened here before him, gave it the formal French plan it still keeps. The palace was destroyed in 1871, which is why the view now runs unbroken to the Louvre.

The Luxor Obelisk is the oldest thing on the route: about 3,300 years old, one of a pair that stood before the temple of Luxor. Egypt's ruler Muhammad Ali offered it to France, it reached Paris in 1833, and King Louis-Philippe had it raised in the middle of the Place de la Concorde in 1836. The choice was pointed. During the Revolution this square held the guillotine, and Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette died here. A monument with no part in French quarrels suited it well.

A temporary tower that stayed, a parade ground, a veterans' hospital with an emperor under its dome, a station that became a museum, a garden that began as a palace's, and an Egyptian stone on a square with too much history. In two hours you have crossed the Left Bank and the river on foot, and the Louvre, close at the garden's end, is waiting for another day.