The Jardin des Tuileries links the Louvre with Place de la Concorde through formal beds, shaded groves, basins, sculpture and a long westward view. Created for a palace that was burned in 1871 and never rebuilt, the garden survives as a public landscape shaped by royal design, revolution and everyday Parisian life.
Quick facts
Catherine de’ Medici commissioned the Tuileries Palace and garden in 1564 on a site named for medieval tileworks.
André Le Nôtre redesigned the garden from 1664 into three sequences—formal Grand Carré, wooded Grand Couvert, and the basin-and-terrace area—whose structure remains legible today.
The palace was burned during the Paris Commune in 1871 and never rebuilt; the garden survived and opened to the general public that year.
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Walk the Tuileries’ central avenue and the garden seems to open Paris like a carefully drawn map: the Louvre lies behind you, the Place de la Concorde ahead, and the Champs-Élysées continue the line beyond. That long view is not an accident. It is the work of a garden designed to shape what people saw—and, over centuries, who was allowed to see it.
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