5 fascinating facts about Paris

Not everyone knows many facts about Paris, even if they concern the most important symbols and landmarks in the city such as the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre Museum.

Whether you are coming to Paris or not, know more about the Parisian culture is always fascinating.

5 facts about Paris

Here are 5 facts about some of the most important places in Paris you may not already know.

• 324 meters high (including the antenna) and built-in 1889 for the Universal Exhibition, the Eiffel Tower had initially caused a few riots among Parisians, many of whom had opposed the construction as it would have ruined the landscape. Not everyone knows curiosity about the name of the tower. The tower could have been named Koechlin-Nouguier. The engineers Émile Nouguier and Maurice Koechlin were the engineers at the origin of the most famous of Parisian monuments.

• The largest museum in the world, today, is the Louvre. But, in medieval times, it was a fortress built to defend Paris from enemy invasions. The palace tower housed a royal safe and a prison for important inmates.

• Paris is the capital of culture. It hosts 134 museums, 143 theaters, and every year it is the set of about 900 films. Actually, besides being the “Mecca” of fashion, Paris surely is the city of cinema. Lumiere brothers projected in Paris their very first experiments. They debuted on December 28, 1895, at the Salon Indien of the Grand Café in Paris on Boulevard des Capucines 14.

• There are no more “stop” signs in Paris. The last one was removed in 2013 and was located on Quai Saint-Exupéry, in the arrondissement 16. This, to facilitate the flow of the traffic according to the authorities.

• The Obelisk in Place de la Concorde, offered to France by Egypt in 1830, is actually also one of the largest sundials in the world.