This weekend we decided to walk around La Defense – a business district, which is technically not a part of Paris, but is considered to be a part of it nonetheless by non-Parisians 🙂
I love this district and with my office being there, visited it almost every day. Since the pandemic hit, I’ve only been to the office once and to La Defense only a few times in total, so it was especially interesting to walk around and to take a look at how it looks now. The biggest changes are is that it is now virtually empty – and there’s some new residents there – never seen ducks in the fountains before! 🙂
And, quoting Wiki (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_D%C3%A9fense):
La Défense (French: [la de.fɑ̃s]) is a major business district located three kilometres west of the city limits of Paris. It is part of the Paris metropolitan area in the Île-de-France region, located in the department of Hauts-de-Seine in the communes of Courbevoie, La Garenne-Colombes, Nanterre, and Puteaux.
La Défense is Europe’s largest purpose-built business district, covering 560 hectares (1,400 acres), with 72 glass and steel buildings (of which 19 are completed skyscrapers), 180,000 daily workers, and 3,500,000 square metres (38,000,000 sq ft) of office space.[1] Around its Grande Arche and esplanade (“le Parvis”), La Défense contains many of the Paris urban area’s tallest high-rises. Les Quatre Temps, a large shopping mall in La Défense, has 220 stores, 48 restaurants and a 24-screen movie theatre.[2]
The district is located at the westernmost extremity of the 10-kilometre-long (6.2 mi) Axe historique (“historical axis”) of Paris, which starts at the Louvre in Central Paris and continues along the Champs-Élysées, well beyond the Arc de Triomphe along the Avenue de la Grande Armée before culminating at La Défense. The district is centred in an orbital motorway straddling the Hauts-de-Seine department communes of Courbevoie, La Garenne-Colombes, Nanterre and Puteaux. La Défense is primarily a business district and hosts a population of 25,000 permanent residents and 45,000 students.[1][3] La Défense is also visited by 8,000,000 tourists each year[1] and houses an open-air museum.[4]