France · Île-de-France · Paris
Paris 13 Gobelins, Paris — Area Guide & Where to Stay
Paris 13 Gobelins is a Left Bank district of Paris where looms still run at the Gobelins Manufactory, with the Butte-aux-Cailles rising to the south.
About Paris 13 Gobelins
Where to stay in Paris 13 Gobelins
Where you base yourself shapes the visit — here's the character of each area.
Paris 13 Gobelins offers a Left Bank base in a working district rather than a monument quarter, which is why rooms here stay quieter than the streets nearer the Seine. Everything pivots on place d'Italie. Beds around it sit on the metro and leave the Butte-aux-Cailles a short climb south, while Gare d'Austerlitz handles arrivals from the southwest.
You want the Paris Rive Gauche end instead if the Bibliothèque nationale de France and a river walk matter more than old streets. The Panthéon and the Musée de Cluny lie outside the district, north across boulevard Saint-Marcel.
About Paris 13 Gobelins
What are the main landmarks in Paris 13 Gobelins?
The Gobelins Manufactory has woven tapestry in Paris 13 Gobelins since the reign of Louis XIV, and its looms still work on avenue des Gobelins. Scale shifts fast here. Four corner towers of the Bibliothèque nationale de France stand over the Seine quays, each built as an open book.
The Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital lines boulevard de l'Hôpital on its climb from Gare d'Austerlitz, and place d'Italie opens onto the Quartier Asiatique that fills the streets off avenue de Choisy. Les Frigos still holds artists' studios in a railway cold store. The Panthéon and the Catacombs of Paris fall outside the boundary, in the 5th and the 14th.
What is the history of Paris 13 Gobelins?
Paris 13 Gobelins was cut in 1860 from the old 12th arrondissement and from land taken off Gentilly and Ivry. Spoken French still calls the arrondissement le treizième. The Bièvre came first.
Dyers of the Gobelins family had worked that river in the Faubourg Saint-Marcel since the fifteenth century, and in 1662 Colbert bought their works for Louis XIV; tanneries and mills crowded the same water until the city buried it underground. Then the towers arrived. The Italie 13 scheme raised more than thirty of them south of place d'Italie, Les Olympiades among them, and its slabs later carried the Quartier Asiatique.
Where is Paris 13 Gobelins?
Paris 13 Gobelins runs from the Seine to the boulevard périphérique, with the 5th arrondissement to the north and rue de la Santé closing it to the west.
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Updated September 2026