Square Willette et Parvis Sacré Ceur

1.The “butte Montmartre”

There are several points of interest, which represent the identity of Montmartre.

-Montmartre is a hill which is 130 meters high. It was a very strategic point for different events, like for exemple during the Paris Commune in 1870.

-It is famous thanks to the basilica of the Sacré Coeur, we have to keep in mind that this place was very early a religious place.

-Montmarte is a synonym of painting: it is very famous because of the numerous artists who worked here and who still work here for exemple in the Tertre Square.

-Montmartre is also a very popular place where inhabitants of Paris meet each other, for exemple in the Marché St Pierre, where you can find a lot of different types of fabrics.

2.The Willette Garden

-It’s a garden of 23,700 square meters, created by Jean Charles Adolphe Alphand who was the Director of Public Ways and Promenades of Paris under Napoleon III. He was the principal engineer for other parks built at this time such as Parc Montsouris, Parc Monceau and Parc des Buttes Chaumont.

-The name of this garden refers to Adolphe Léon Willette, a French paintor, an illustrator and a caricaturist of the XIXth c. He lived in Montmartre and illustrated the pages of such magazines as "Le Chat Noir", "Le Pied de Nez", and "Le Courrier Français". He decorated a lot of cabarets of Montmartre, and he drew the famous mill of the Moulin Rouge. He died in 1926.

But in 2004, the name of the garden changed and became square Louise Michel, because Willette was known as an anti-Semite. Louise Michel was an anarchistic woman who played a great part in the Paris Commune in 1870.

The square was conceived acording to the hilly landscape; the stairs put the Sacré Coeur in perspective and they emphasize it.

3.The fountain

The monumental fountain was created by Paul Gasq in 1932. It is composed of three basins carried by the Ocean Gods.

The stone used for the fountains and the stairs, as well as for the Sacre Coeur basilica, releases calcium when it rains. It’s a white substance, which resists pollution and gives the everlasting white appearance.

Montmartre was known for centuries because of its gypsum quarries, it gave its name to the Square Blanche which received a lot of gypsum dust.

At the beginning of the 19th century, zoologist Georges Cuvier discovered fossils of more than 43 million years old encrusted in fragments of gypsum. This discovery on Butte Montmartre resulted in the creation of paleontology in 1834.

4.Trees

The garden has two different sides. We have seen the first, which was very geometrical; the other looks like paths in the mountain. We can find here a great variety of trees, for example gingko biloba, magnolias, fig tree, pomegranate tree and araucarias. There is an Indian hazelnut tree, 20 meters tall and over 3 meters in circumference, planted in 1902 and a pterocarya also 20 meters tall and over 3 meters in circumference planted in 1899.

There are also two Osage orange trees of 17 meters in height, planted in 1922. The name of these trees comes from the Native American tribe of Missouri who would paint their faces from the extract of the fruit and of the bark.

5.The panoramic view

Here we have a strategic point of view on Paris. We can have a glance on different wel-known monuments (North Station, Saint Vincent de Paul church, Centre Pompidou, Our Lady of Paris, Saint Eustache church, the Pantheon, the Louvre, Montparnasse Tower (the tallest skyscraper in France), Orsay museum, the cupola of Invalides...