When friends visit Paris, they often ask me to accompany them on the perfect day trip. Most have already done the Chartres Cathedral, the Fontainebleau Château and Monet’s house with its water lilies at Giverny.
“Now what?” they ask.
“Let’s go to Lens,” I tell them.
“Never heard of it” is the usual reply.
But take the trip to Lens, only an hour and 10 minutes north of Paris, near the Belgian border, by high-speed rail, and you will find an outpost of the Louvre called the Louvre-Lens, a modern glass-and-steel art museum with some of the best artworks from its parent museum — free, easy and without the crowds.
“Americans could imagine a museum in an industrial city like Detroit with the architectural creativity of the Guggenheim and a collection worthy of the Met,” Annabelle Ténèze, the museum’s director, said.
The city also has quirky Art Deco facades to see, vestiges of World War I to discover and terrils — cone-shaped hills of coal slag — to climb.
A Legacy of War and Coal
Lens, population 30,000, was a booming industrial center after coal was discovered there in 1849.
Then World War I rolled over the city, leaving some of the worst destruction on the French front. Artillery barrages flattened most of it; half the population died or fled. The town rebuilt. Many new structures were finished with Art Deco facades that remain today.
Then came World War II. During the 1944 bombings by the Allies, hundreds of people died and a thousand buildings were destroyed. Coal lost its value, and the mines closed in 1986. Battered and demoralized, Lens was an unlikely place for the Louvre’s first regional branch.
But in 2012, open it did.
A visit to Lens begins at the train station, a jewel of Art Deco architecture that is made of reinforced concrete and shaped like a steam locomotive. The mosaic murals on the station’s inner walls tell the story of the mining and railway industries. Across the street was once the Art Deco movie theater Apollo, recently restored as a hotel and restaurant.
Start your visit with a 25-minute stroll to the Louvre-Lens museum, which lies across a 50-acre landscaped park with fields of wildflowers, trees and walkways along routes that once transported coal and a curved concrete path evoking a Japanese garden.
Or do as I do and stroll around the center of town, an architectural hodgepodge loaded with Art Deco facades. In the main town square is Maison Claude Jeanson, an 85-year-old teahouse and pastry shop with stone-topped tables and cushioned chairs. Specialties include crusty almond croissants, candied apples and elaborate handmade chocolate sculptures of famous works of art (3.60 euros, or about $4.20, for coffee and a croissant).
The Museum
A mile to the west of the town center, Louvre-Lens, designed by the Japanese architecture firm Sanaa, is a laboratory for what art museums might become. It sits on a raised slag heap, the site of what was once coal mine pit No. 9. To blend with the landscape and rainy skies, the architects built five low-lying structures in gray and silver.
The heart of the museum, the Galerie du Temps (Gallery of Time), displays the permanent collection, which is free. The gallery, a 32,000-square-foot space with aluminum walls and pale stone floors, takes the form of a curving, moving, chronological “River of Time” that allows visitors to navigate the works as they please. The gallery feeds into the Glass Pavilion, intended for temporary exhibitions, which gives way to the gardens, filled with seasonal plants and modern sculptures.
The art in the Galerie du Temps spans dozens of civilizations and styles, from prehistory to modern times. The works are displayed not geographically, as is the case at the Louvre in Paris, but in multidisciplinary arrangements, ever-changing, in loose chronological order.
In 2024, the Louvre-Lens renovated its spaces, replacing most of the works that had been on display. The Louvre in Paris lent it more than 200 masterpieces, including half a dozen ancient Egyptian sphinxes and Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s painting series “The Four Seasons.” Artworks on loan from other museums — like a limestone sculpture of a bull from 18,000 B.C. — enhance the space.
Temporary exhibitions — sometimes more daring and inventive than those organized by the Louvre in Paris — have explored topics like the evolution of war images to the dining tables of power in France.
The Terrils
After lunch — either at the museum’s cafeteria or at the modern, glass-fronted restaurant L’Atelier du Cerisier on the museum grounds — head by bike or taxi two miles northwest to the entrance at the base of the terrils.
In 2012, UNESCO designated the entire coal mining basin in the region a World Heritage site. A decade later, the slag heaps in Lens came to life as a sustainable tourist attraction. From far away they look black, but get close and you can see the green of the grasses and plants that grow there.
Because the terrils absorb solar heat, creating warm, dry conditions, ecologists have planted bushes and flowers, including orchids, wild roses and exotic species like South African cape ragwort. There are chardonnay grape vines (the wine they produce — although not much yet — is playfully called “charbonnay”; charbon is the French word for coal).
During one visit, I took a one-hour hike to the top of the two terrils, which are more than 600 feet high. They have become a destination for bird watching and occasional classes in music, art therapy and meditation.
The path for pedestrians up the terrils is paved much of the way but becomes stony, steeper, windy and more difficult the higher you go. Climbers should wear hiking shoes and windbreakers, and carry water bottles and binoculars.
The 360-degree view includes the restored vestiges of the coal workers’ village and mining operation, Lens and its massive soccer stadium, and a Canadian World War I memorial on Vimy Ridge in the distance.
Remembering World War I
For those who want to focus on the Great War, head four miles west from the Louvre-Lens to the hill called Notre Dame de Lorette.
The Art Deco-inspired basilica and Notre Dame de Lorette Cemetery — the largest French national war cemetery — honor the more than 42,000 French soldiers who died in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region during World War I. A small visitors’ and history center is down the hill, and also nearby is the Ring of Remembrance, an international memorial with the names of almost 580,000 soldiers who died in the region between 1914 and 1918.
Four miles south is the Canadian National Memorial with the Vimy monument that pays tribute to the 66,000 Canadian soldiers who died in France during the Great War. Visitors can walk through reconstructed trenches.
Leaving Lens
As you head back to Paris after your explorations, be sure to stop at La Loco bar across from the train station for the Ch’ti local beer on tap and the French fries, which it claims are the best in the world. A medium order — two pounds of fries for 4 euros — is served finger-burning hot and spread out in front of you on a sheet of waxed paper. Take them to go if there is not enough time — the perfect snack for the train.
Elaine Sciolino, a contributing writer for The New York Times in Paris, is the author of “Adventures in the Louvre: How to Fall in Love With the World’s Greatest Museum.”
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