Don’t let the name put you off – this rather dryly titled museum (la Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration) is housed in one of the city’s most jaw-dropping buildings, completely art deco (the same period that inspired our most recent 4-star hotel, Le Baume), with a crazy façade and a huge aquarium in the basement!

It really is astounding. Check out our report!

Le Palais de la Porte Dorée – The Palace of the Golden Door. The name itself conjures up grand, exotic images, and once you get there the place is almost certainly as impressive as you might imagine. There’s no other building like it in Paris.

Built for the Colonial Exposition of 1931 (and probably the last tangible trace of that slightly dubious event) the building spans over 16,000m², with a façade of 1,100 m² of sculpted frescoes by Alfred Janniot who also has some of his work adorning the Seine side of the Palais de Tokyo.

Perhaps if we say that we took nearly 40 photos just of the façade, you’ll understand how much we really love it to bits.
Once inside, the entrance is huge with high ceilings, a restaurant at one end and art deco salons at each front corner, one inspired by Africa, the other by Asia. You can only peak in, but they are impressive nonetheless.
The building’s central room goes up at least three floors, is bathed in natural light and has lovely mosaic tiles on the floor and huge painting on most fo the walls. What a room! Once again we took a ton of photos…
Once you go upstairs, the balconies of this room explain the history of the building and the museum itself. It’s an interesting and slightly sad story – for example, no-one from the French government dared come to the museum inauguration, a sign that France still hasn’t properly dealt with and accepted its colonial past and current immigration 🙁

On the second floor, on the sides and front of the building, you’ll find the permanent exhibition, really well designed and explained (in three languages, including English). It’s also very moving. France shipped in thousands of people when the country needed rebuilding, but with unemployment rising, it is having an increasingly difficult time accepting the immagran population (as shown by the support for the National Front party, and the fact that foreigners do not have the right to vote in national elections).

The exhibition unsurprisingly shows that living conditions for many immigrants are below average at best, and often squalid. A lots of the photo reports and testimonies are extremely poignant.
There is also a space for temporary exhibitions, and although photos are not allowed there, we took a quickie and didn’t get caught!
And the building has another surprise in store in the basement – a vast aquarium (which was the only one in Paris for many years, before the one in Trocadéro opened). You’ll be able to see numerous beautiful fish, as well as a few alligators and the two recently-arrived albino alligators.

We though this little guy was really cute, cleaning away with his little flat mouth…

So, a lot to see!

Ideally, you will need a couple of visits in order to read all the information given. We definitely intend to return, perhaps in the summer when we can have lunch on the vast terrace and finish the afternoon with a walk in the Bois de Vincennes which is just opposite…

The Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration (here) is open every day except Mondays form 10.30am – 5.30pm (7pm at weekends)

Admission: between 3.50€ and 10€ depending on exactly what you want to see

Official site: www.histoire-immigration.fr

Facebook: facebook.com/citeimmigration

Twitter: twitter.com/citeimmigration

To check out all our photos of the Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration in Paris, click here.