Rue Daguerre
The pedestrian street of food lovers: greengrocers, cheesemongers, wine merchants, terraces. An open-air market every day.
Plaisance · Paris 14th
Plaisance, Paris 14th.
A village within the city. Five minutes from the metro. Twenty minutes from everything.
The neighborhood
A former working-class faubourg, still defiant.
Among the many villages that make up Paris, Plaisance, on the edge of Montparnasse, is not the most famous, and that is precisely why it has kept its soul. A former working-class faubourg annexed to Paris in 1860, it still cultivates a popular, slightly defiant identity: artists' studios behind carriage doors, cobblestone streets that smell of warm bread, terraces where people linger, and cafés where the owner knows you by the third morning. Far from the crowds of the Right Bank, ten minutes from Montparnasse, the 14th moves to its own rhythm, that of Parisians who actually live here.
Transport
Five minutes from the metro. Twenty minutes from everything.
Plaisance metro (line 13) is a 5-min walk, heading to Saint-Lazare, the Champs and Montmartre. T3a tram along the southern ring. Three Vélib bike stations within 100 m. Buses 58, 62, 95 right at the door. And Gare Montparnasse ten minutes away for weekend trips out of town.
Within minutes, you're there
Eiffel Tower
18 min
Saint-Germain
15 min
Le Marais
25 min
Notre-Dame
20 min
Sacré-Cœur
30 min
Montparnasse
10 min walk
Vélib · 1 min Bus 58 · 62 · 95 75014 Paris
The walk · Plaisance
A loop around Pernety.
A one-hour loop to feel the soul of the neighborhood. Start at Place de Séoul, walk up to Notre-Dame-du-Travail, wander down Rue des Thermopyles, and end at Place de Catalogne, beneath Bofill's colonnades.
- 01
Place de Séoul · Les Échelles du baroque
Ricardo Bofill's post-modern gesture: theatrical columns, staircases and façades, at the heart of the great Maine-Montparnasse project of the 70s and 80s.
- 02
Notre-Dame-du-Travail
One of the most surprising churches in Paris: a riveted iron nave like an industrial hall, a tribute to the workers who built the 1900 World Fair.
- 03
Le Château Ouvrier
A 19th-century model of social housing: inner courtyards, workshops, modest dwellings, a quiet utopia that has crossed the century.
- 04
Rue des Thermopyles
A green, cobblestoned enclave, suspended out of time. Wisterias, ivy, artists' studios: the village inside the village.
- 05
Place de Catalogne
Bofill's other great composition: a circus of pale stone, a mirror fountain, opening to the southern Parisian sky.
Around · The 14th
And all around, the 14th opens up.
On foot, in just a few minutes, you slip from one atmosphere to another. Markets, parks, theatres, places of memory: here are the stops we recommend.
The Catacombs
Six million souls neatly stacked beneath our feet, ten minutes from the door. Vertiginous, silent, unforgettable.
Parc Montsouris
The great green lung of southern Paris. A lake, swans, sloping lawns, joggers at sunrise.
Cité internationale universitaire
A world-campus of 40 pavilions by master architects, from Le Corbusier's Maison du Brésil to the Collège d'Espagne. A must to walk through.
Rue de la Gaîté
The old street of pleasures: Bobino, the Théâtre Montparnasse, the Rive Gauche. A Paris of cabarets, still standing.
Montparnasse cemetery
Sartre and Beauvoir, Baudelaire, Gainsbourg, Duras, Cortázar. A literary stroll, alley by alley.
Parc Georges-Brassens
Former horse market halls, vineyards, an old-book market on weekends. The Brassens spirit, in the open air.
Alésia
Avenue du Général-Leclerc, its brasseries, the Saint-Pierre church, and bourgeois Paris drifting down toward Porte d'Orléans.
Want to go deeper?
The neighborhood notebook awaits.
For the real addresses, my true favorites, the bakeries I love, the bistros where I take my friends, the cheesemonger you really should know, it's all in the neighborhood notebook.
Read the neighborhood notebook