Walk Paris with FOG

Paris is small, dense and almost entirely walkable, which makes clearing its fog unusually rewarding. Then you notice how many streets you have never once turned down.

Paris in FOG, with the fog burned off along a walked route following the Seine through the centre.

Small city, complicated inside

Inside the peripherique, Paris is about a hundred square kilometres. That is nothing. You could in principle walk across the whole thing in a long day. The twenty arrondissements spiral clockwise out from the Louvre, so the numbers themselves tell you roughly where you are and how far from the middle.

What makes it slow is the texture. Haussmann drove wide boulevards through the city in the nineteenth century, and those are the fast lines, but between them the Marais and the Latin Quarter kept their medieval tangle of lanes, courtyards and dead ends. A single block can hide four streets you have never walked. The fog in Paris is not one big blanket, it is thousands of small holes.

The river route

Start at Bastille and walk west along Rue Saint-Antoine into the Marais, taking any side street that looks narrow. Come out at the Hotel de Ville, drop to the quais and follow the Seine past the Ile de la Cite and the Ile Saint-Louis. Cross the Pont Neuf, carry on past the Louvre and through the Tuileries, and you can finish at Concorde or push on up the Champs-Elysees.

That is a few hours and it clears a clean band right through the historic centre. The other classic line is the Canal Saint-Martin, from Republique north past the iron footbridges to Bassin de la Villette and Parc de la Villette. It is straighter, quieter and it opens up the tenth and nineteenth, which most visitors never touch.

The hills nobody warns you about

Paris is flat until it very much is not. Montmartre is a butte, and the climb up from Pigalle to Sacre-Coeur is a real one. Belleville and Menilmontant in the east are a long steady rise, and Buttes-Chaumont is built on a former quarry with steep paths and a cliff in the middle of it. Pere Lachaise climbs too, and its lanes are a small maze of their own.

These eastern hills are where the good walking is, and they are where the map stays foggy longest, because nobody wanders up there by accident. Add the Bois de Vincennes and the Bois de Boulogne on either flank, both enormous, and the percent has plenty left to give even after you have done the centre.

Repetition, weather and the honest bits

The star intersections are a trap. At Etoile, Nation or Denfert-Rochereau the avenues radiate, and it is easy to walk the same three spokes for a year without realising the others exist. FOG is good at showing you exactly that: the cleared shape ends up looking like a hand with two fingers.

Weather is mild and grey rather than difficult. Paris rains lightly and often, winters are cold but not severe, and August empties the city out, which is oddly a good time to walk it. There are no serious GPS problems here since the buildings are low by modern standards, so tracks stay tidy even in narrow streets. Background exploring keeps revealing with the phone away, and a five-hour drift across the arrondissements records itself.

Questions people actually ask

Start with a dark map.

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