Saint-Germain-en-Laye

Saint-Germain-en-Laye sits on a plateau just west of Paris, a straight shot on the RER A that makes it one of the easiest genuine day trips from the city, and the reason it took me embarrassingly long to visit is exactly that ease — it never felt urgent when it was always available. That was a mistake. The château here isn’t a minor royal residence; it’s where Louis XIV was born in 1638 and spent much of his childhood before eventually decamping to Versailles, largely, according to some accounts, because the view from Saint-Germain’s terrace reminded him too much of a childhood scare during the Fronde uprising when the court had to flee Paris in the middle of the night.

A château that predates Versailles as the seat of power

The current building is largely a Renaissance-era reconstruction ordered by Francis I in the 1540s, built on much older medieval foundations, and its pentagonal towers and dry moat give it a squarer, more fortress-like presence than the châteaux built purely for pleasure later in the century. Since 1867 it’s housed the Musée d’Archéologie Nationale, a genuinely excellent collection covering French prehistory through the early Middle Ages — the Lady of Brassempouy carving, Gallo-Roman bronzes, Merovingian jewelry — laid out through room after room of the château’s original halls. Lia, who has more patience for prehistoric artifacts than I do, spent nearly an hour in the Paleolithic rooms alone while I wandered ahead into the more familiar Gallo-Roman galleries.

The terrace, the forest, and a very long straight line

Outside, Le Nôtre — the same landscape architect behind Vaux-le-Vicomte and Versailles — designed the Grande Terrasse in the 1670s, a two-kilometer-long straight promenade along the edge of the plateau that gives an unbroken view out over the Seine valley toward La Défense and, on a clear day, the towers of Paris itself. Behind the château, the Forêt de Saint-Germain spreads out over three and a half thousand hectares, one of the largest forests still within easy reach of the city, criss-crossed with trails that Parisians have used to escape the city for centuries longer than the RER has existed. We walked a stretch of the terrace at golden hour and it’s one of those views that makes you reassess how you thought about the region’s geography — Paris suddenly looks small and specific, sitting in a wide, forested basin.

When to go: Late afternoon on a clear day gives the best light on the Grande Terrasse view toward Paris; the forest is at its most atmospheric in autumn.