The Pond in the Tuileries

The Tuileries is a magnificent garden in the center of Paris. The name reveals the area’s past. Tuile is the French word for tile. From the 1200s to the 1500s, the area was full of tile-making kilns, or tuileries. In the 1560s, Queen Catherine de Medici, wife of King Henry II, bought the land to make room for a new palace and a large garden. A century later, at the request of Charles Perrault, author of Sleeping Beauty and other fairy tales, the Tuileries became the first royal garden the public could visit. Revolutionaries torched the palace in 1871, but the garden remains a place to stroll and sail model boats.