Uncovering the Bièvre, Paris's Forgotten Second River

30.11.2023 - 16:29 / cntraveler.com / Napoleon Iii III (Iii)

There have been songs written about La Seine, movies set alongside her quays, and masterpieces painted about her. While the Seine is definitely Paris’s favorite river, there is its lesser-known, black-sheep sibling: the Bièvre River.

The Bièvre meanders for around three miles through Paris: It stretches across the city’s south-east corner, enters the city limits at Parc Kellermann in the 13th arrondissement, and heads north toward the Seine through the Latin Quarter in the 5th. And yet it is hidden at pedestrian level, its path marked only by metal discs on the streets above its course.

Since the 15th century, when the Gobelins Manufacture, a historic tapestry factory, was established in Paris, the Bièvre was used by tanners and tapestry makers as a handy source of water and an easy place to dispose of their trade’s waste; the residents used it as a sewer. By the end of the 1800s, the small river had become completely contaminated, and was eventually fully paved over in 1912 by none other than Baron Haussmann, who worked on Napoleon III’s urban renewal program of Paris, which in the late 19th century made turned the capital into the gorgeous, honey-hued city it is today.

Now, in the 21st century, Paris is making impressive attempts at sustainable city living: The cleanup of the Seine has made it officially swimmable by 2024, in time for the Olympics. But the Bièvre has its fans too. The Friends of the Bièvre and the river’s neighbors are becoming more vocal through political actions and petitions about daylighting the Bièvre, turning it once more into a viable and vital part of the city, adding to green and blue spaces in Paris as per the C40 pledge.

Daylighting rivers is the practice of uncovering a buried watercourse or a part thereof, according to the University of Waterloo, California. Freeing rivers from their buried conditions offers plenty of environmental benefits: It opens up habitats to improve biodiversity; creates recreational green spaces within the city; and exposes natural flowing rivers, open to the sky, so they can absorb heat, release evaporated water droplets, and cool the air—all of which helps with the dire prospect of Paris becoming much hotter over the next few years. Natural rivers also help against floods by acting as ecological flood plains, while avoiding choke points created by culverts and concrete channels.

Toward these environmental goals, change is already underway. Upstream, just outside the Paris ring road, La Peripherique, stretches of the Bièvre in the suburbs of Arcueil and Gentilly, have recently been reopened, according to the Friends of the Bièvre. Furthermore, a section within Paris proper, near Parc Kellerman, where the Bièvre can still be seen forming a