Description of the attraction
In the Paris Sewerage Museum, you can get acquainted in detail with the history of the struggle of the metropolis for cleanliness and sanitary safety. Not the best topic for small talk, but a huge problem for any big city.
This was well understood by the Romans: sewer pipes were found under the ruins of Roman baths in the Latin Quarter. With the fall of the Roman Empire, the Parisians forgot about sanitation; liquid waste was simply thrown into the street ditches. In 1131, at the Greve market, a black pig overturned the horse of King Philip the Young - the monarch fell into a heap of excrement and died a day later. Open drains were sources of infection and terrible stench.
In 1370, the provost of Paris, Hugues Aubriot, built the first real sewerage system - the vaulted tunnel under Montmartre. Under Louis XIV, a large circular sewer pipe was built on the banks of the Seine. Under Napoleon, the capital's sewerage system already consisted of 30 km of tunnels.
The real changes began under the prefect of Paris, Baron Haussmann. Engineer Eugene Belgran has developed an advanced sewerage and water supply system. At the same time, he decided to use the old tunnels, clogged with age-old mud. The Parisians themselves cleaned 200 tunnels free of charge: for this, a rumor was started about the allegedly available treasures here. By 1878, the city's sewerage network had grown to 600 km.
Today, the Parisian sewerage and wastewater treatment system is one of the largest in Europe. Under the city, 2,100 km of tunnels have been laid, which have become a mirror image of streets on the surface: they have the same names and the same numbering of "houses".
The Sewerage Museum is located in the underground galleries near the Alma Bridge. There are ramps for visitors, along which you can walk along the existing collectors. Fans supply fresh air. You can see the current flood protection system of the Resistance Square, the Cognac-Zhe street connection, the Bosquet Avenue collector.
Today the Parisian sewers are run by computers. But on the stands of the museum you can see the equipment used by sewer cleaners in past eras, and even their weapons found in the tunnels.
