Friday afternoon drive around the Paris district home to many of the city’s tallest high-rises. La Défense in Paris is Europe’s largest purpose-built business district with 72 glass and steel buildings, 180,000 daily workers, and 38,000,000 sq ft of office space. La Défense is also visited by 8,000,000 tourists each year. Les Quatre Temps, a large shopping mall in La Défense, has 220 stores, 48 restaurants and 24 movie theaters.

La Défense is a major business district and is three kilometres west of Paris. It is part of the Paris Metropolitan Area in the Île-de-France region, located in the department Hauts-de-Seine spread across the communes of Courbevoie, Nanterre, and Puteaux.

La Défense is Europe’s largest purpose-built business district with 560 hectares (1,400 acres) of area, 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. Around its Grande Arche and esplanade (“le Parvis”), La Défense contains many of the Paris urban area’s tallest high-rises.

The district is located at the westernmost extremity of the 10-kilometre-long (6.2 mi) 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 département municipalities of Courbevoie, Nanterre, and Puteaux. La Défense is primarily a business district and hosts a population of 25,000 permanent residents and 45,000 students. La Défense is also visited by 8,000,000 tourists each year and houses an open-air museum.

Important corporations headquartered at La Défense include Neuf Cegetel, Société Générale, Total, Aventis, Areva, and Arcelor. The tallest skyscraper, the Tour First belongs to AXA, constructed in 1974. It is 231 metres (758 ft) high, has 50 floors, and is the highest inhabited building in the Paris area (a title previously held by the Tour Montparnasse, which was the tallest inhabited building until the Tour First was renovated between 2007 and 2011, bringing it to its current height from a previous 159 metres (522 ft); the tallest structure in Paris is the Eiffel Tower).

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