In a narrow, small valley surrounded by wild woods, far from any residential areas, lies a stunning public park: Les Sources de la Seine. With its green-painted wooden benches, garden paths, artificial grotto gurgling with water and small stone chalet, it feels like being in Paris, in a small part of the Buttes-Chaumont park.

And yet, this is no hallucination: this bucolic landscape is located in the heart of the Burgundy countryside, some 40 kilometers from Dijon. But the resemblance to the park located in Paris' 19^th arrondissement is no mere coincidence: both green spaces were created at the same time, in the 1860s, under Emperor Napoleon III. It was Jean-Pierre Barillet-Deschamps (1824-1873), the City of Paris' head gardener, who gave the Côte-d'Or green space its Parisian park look.

In 1864, under the crucial impetus of Seine department Prefect Baron Haussmann, the City of Paris acquired the nearly 2-hectare Burgundy valley for its symbolic value: this is where seven springs come out of the ground to form a small stream below that then becomes France's second-largest river, the Seine.

The river must travel some 300 kilometers before reaching the capital and even further to end up in the English Channel, between Le Havre and Honfleur. Few people know that this 776-kilometer river journey begins in the aptly named village of Source-Seine, one of France's smallest communes, with a population of barely 60.

On this February morning, all seemed quiet in Les Sources, surrounded by woods. A damp, ephemeral fog rolled across the place, adding a touch of mystery. Only the splash of water could be heard in various parts of the park. Further down the valley, an imposing artificial grotto, or nymphaeum, designed by the famous Parisian architects Victor Baltard and Gabriel Davioud, appeared.

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