Les Halles & the Bourse de Commerce

The belly of Paris

Les Halles was the central food market of Paris for some eight centuries. In the 1850s–1870s the architect Victor Baltard covered it with vast iron-and-glass pavilions that Émile Zola immortalised as le ventre de Paris — the belly of Paris. In 1969 the wholesale market moved out to Rungis; the pavilions were demolished in 1971, leaving the notorious "trou des Halles". The hole was filled by the underground Forum des Halles shopping centre (1979) and, in 2016, crowned with the wave-like glass Canopée roof.

The Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection

Beside the Forum stands the circular former grain hall and commodities exchange, crowned by a 19th-century glass-and-iron dome. In 2021 it reopened as the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, a contemporary-art museum: the Japanese architect Tadao Ando inserted a bare concrete cylinder beneath the historic dome to display works from the collection of François Pinault. The building is a listed monument and the museum a paid, ticketed visit.

Around Les Halles

The neighbourhood repays a short wander: the soaring Gothic-Renaissance Église Saint-Eustache and its monumental organ, the round-the-clock brasserie Au Pied de Cochon (open since 1947), and, a few minutes away, the Louvre, the Palais-Royal and the Pont Neuf on the tip of the Île de la Cité.