Paris Skate Spots: 378 Street Spots, 22 Parks
City Guides ·
Paris has 438 mapped spots and 86% of them are street. Here is what that ratio does to how you skate the city, with the clusters worth walking.
We have 438 spots mapped in Paris. 378 of them are Street. 22 are parks, 27 are shops, 9 are private, 2 are DIY. That is 86% street, and it is the single most useful fact about skating here.
Compare the two numbers that matter. The median distance from a Paris street spot to the nearest mapped park is 1,124 metres. The median distance from a Paris street spot to the nearest *other* street spot is 177 metres. You are, on average, six times closer to another piece of street than you are to a park. Skating Paris off a park list means walking past almost everything.
The ratio is not an accident of our data
It would be easy to say the park count is low because nobody has logged them. Look closer and the number gets softer, not harder. Two of the 22 park entries are the same place logged twice: EGP 18 has a second entry at the same address on Rue Charles Hermite, and so does Skatepark Charonne on Rue Emile Lepeu. One entry filed as a park is Place de la Concorde, which is a square. Call it twenty actual parks for a city of two million people.
The good ones are worth the trip. Jemmapes has 22 photos on it, MLK Skatepark and EGP 18 have 19 each. But twenty destinations spread across twenty arrondissements is a driving problem, and Paris is not a driving city. 354 of the 378 street spots have another street spot within 500 metres. 212 of them have one within 200 metres. The city is built for the walk.
Squares do the heavy lifting
Seventeen street spots have "place" or "plaza" in the name, and they hold most of the photo volume in the dataset. Place Henri Frenay behind Gare de Lyon carries 54 photos, fourth-highest of any spot in the city. Place du Quebec has 19, Place Louis Marin in the 5th has 18, Place des fêtes up in the 19th has 11.
These are civic squares that happen to be skateable, not skate plazas. The list runs through Place des Etas-Unis, Place d'iéna, Place du Carrousel, Place de l'Odéon, place Kandinsky, Place d'Alleray. Add the big named-building forecourts, Palais de Tokyo (Le Dome) at 100 photos, Bercy at 82, Austerlitz at 56, Trocadero at 34, and you have the top of the pile. All of it is public ground someone put a fountain on.
The river is a spot corridor
Twelve street spots are named for a quai, and the ponts and passerelles between them fill the gaps. Quai de Seine at 21 photos and Quai de Jussieu at 20 sit 78 metres apart on the same stretch of the Left Bank. Quai d'Austerlitz and Quai de la gare have 14 each. Port de Bercy has 19.
The crossings are logged as spots in their own right: Passerelle Simone de Beauvoir, Passerelle Debilly, Pont de Sully, Pont de Bercy. If you want a day with no metro in it, pick a bank and follow it.
Almost nothing here is named for its obstacle
This is worth being straight about. The `obstacles` field is empty on all 438 Paris entries, so the only terrain information in the dataset is whatever a local typed into the spot name. About three dozen spots did that.
The full inventory of self-describing names is small: five gaps, including Street Gap on Quai des Tuileries with 11 photos and gap over rail into bank on Rue Manin. Four ledges, among them Scheffer ledge and Monoprix Ledge. Five rails, including Rail du Quai de Valmy and petit rail on Sébastopol. Eleven stair spots, from Gare du Nord Double Set to 6 stair charlety to les escaliers. Five spots with "bank" in the name, headed by Avenue d'Italie Banks at 13 photos and Bercy banks. Three walls, one hubba at Beaugrenelle Hubba, one manual pad at Longchamp manual.
Everything else is named for the building it is bolted to: a school, a post office, a church, an insurance office. Bureau La Poste Darius Milhaud, College Brassens, Radio France, Université Descartes at 28 photos, Université Paris-Diderot at 17. Check the photos before you commit to a trek. 395 of the 438 entries carry at least one, but 27 street spots have none at all, and the name will not tell you what is there.
Four pockets where the walking pays off
Iéna and Chaillot, 16th, spilling over the river into the 7th. Fourteen street spots sit inside a 600m circle drawn on Palais de Tokyo. Passerelle Debilly is 133m out, Place d'iéna 236m, Quai Branly 245m, Chaillot 298m, then Institut de L'Epaule, Place des Etas-Unis, Virgil and Telegramme all inside half a kilometre. Trocadero is a further 686m from Le Dome if you want to end there.
Bercy, 12th and 13th. Twelve street spots sit inside a 600m circle drawn on Bercy. Stairs at 220 Quai de Bercy is 221m away, Gap at 24 Quai de Bercy is 315m, Port de Bercy 406m, Quai de la gare 469m. Skatepark de Bercy sits 95m from the Stairs entry, which makes this the one part of Paris where the park and the street are genuinely the same session.
Jussieu and the Left Bank, 5th. Quai de Seine to Quai de Jussieu is 78m. Jussieu to Institut du Monde Arabe is 93m. Bibliotheque Atrium is 280m from the quai, Pont de Sully 295m, and ledge/manual pad 351m.
Beaugrenelle, 15th. Tight enough to be almost one spot. Beaugrenelle Hubba to Parking Brazzaville is 9 metres. beaugrenelle is 123m, Dalle de Beaugrenelle 173m, Beaugrenelle Bowling 217m.
One thing those four have in common: none of them is a neighbourhood you would pick off a map for its skate reputation. Iéna is embassies. Bercy is a ministry and an arena. Beaugrenelle is a 1970s housing slab with a shopping centre in it. The pockets exist because the architecture repeats itself over a few blocks, not because anyone designed for skating.
The shop belt is its own walk
27 of the 438 entries are shops, and they are not spread evenly. 18 of them sit inside a 1.5km radius centred near Rue du Temple. Inside 500 metres of that centre there are seven shops and only three mapped street spots, which makes the Marais and Saint-Denis the one part of central Paris where the retail is denser than the terrain: Carhartt Le Marais, SUPRA, Vans, Wasted, Léchoppe, Supreme Paris, Le 39.
Push out to a kilometre and you pick up nineteen street spots, which is a fine way to spend the back half of a day: Rue Brantôme, Fontaine des Innocents, Les Halles, Bourse, and Johann Strauss, which at 24 photos is the best-documented spot in the area.
The edge and the quiet blocks
Thirteen street spots are named for a porte, the old city gates now sitting on the périphérique: Porte Maillot at 15 photos, Porte de la Vilette at 9, Porte de st cloud at 6. They are the far end of the map in every direction and they are where the density thins out.
Then there is Auteuil, which is its own argument for the street-first read. Fourteen street spots inside a 600m circle on Tennis club Ribera, and almost every one of them has exactly two photos: Georges Sand at 175m, Avenue Mozart at 213m, Jasmin, Serge Prokofiev, Eglise d'Auteil, Yvette. Nobody is filming a part here. Somebody walked the neighbourhood and logged what they found, which is exactly the method the city rewards.
Full list, filters and photos are on the Paris city page. Start with a pocket, not a park.