National Museum of Natural History, Paris

The National Museum of Natural History (Muséum national d'histoire naturelle) is France's natural history museum, with its main site in the Jardin des Plantes at 57 Rue Cuvier in Paris's 5th arrondissement, near the Gare d'Austerlitz. Its Grande Galerie de l'Évolution, greenhouses and Ménagerie zoo make it a strong choice for families and anyone interested in animals, plants and science.

Louis XIII's medicinal garden of 1626

The museum traces its history to the Royal Garden of Medicinal Plants, founded by edict of Louis XIII in 1626 and created in 1635 to grow plants for medicine and teaching. After the Revolution it became the national natural history museum, a research and teaching institution that still runs collections and laboratories. It also runs other sites, including the Musée de l'Homme at the Trocadéro.

Opened in 1889, reopened by Mitterrand in 1994

The best-known building opened in 1889, for the Exposition Universelle, as the Gallery of Zoology, and closed in 1965 after years of decline. After a long renovation, President François Mitterrand reopened it on 21 June 1994 as the Grande Galerie de l'Évolution. Under its glass roof, thousands of specimens fill four floors, led by a great parade of African animals, with a hall of extinct and endangered species and a children's gallery. They are only a small part of the museum's animal collections.

Mineralogy gallery, greenhouses and the Ménagerie

The garden holds the gallery of mineralogy and geology, the gallery of palaeontology and comparative anatomy (listed as temporarily closed in 2026), the large tropical greenhouses and the Ménagerie, one of the oldest public zoos in the world. Formal flower beds and a botanical school, with plants arranged and labelled by family, make the garden worth a walk in itself, especially in spring. A winter light festival is held in the garden.

Buffon, Lamarck and 67 million specimens

The museum's collections number about 67 million specimens, and it runs 14 sites across France, four of them in Paris. It was formally founded by the National Convention on 10 June 1793. Before that, the naturalist Buffon directed the royal garden from 1739 to 1788 and wrote his 36-volume Natural History there; his statue stands in front of the Grande Galerie. Lamarck and Cuvier were among the first professors after 1793. The Grande Galerie's central hall is 55 metres long, 25 metres wide and 15 metres high.

The Ménagerie was built up between 1798 and 1836 with animals from the royal menagerie at Versailles and is the second-oldest public zoo still operating, after Vienna's Schönbrunn. The two large greenhouses keep tropical plants at around 22°C. Across its sites the museum received about 3.8 million visitors in 2024.