The avenues, and the flat city most visitors never reach

What follows is the working version of the northern avenues: the decisions in the order you actually meet them, with the reasoning attached.

A planned expansion

As the city outgrew its old limits, a broad tree-lined boulevard was cut northward and a grid of avenues laid out beyond it. The model was the nineteenth-century European boulevard, with generous pavements, planted central strips and apartment blocks above shops.

The result is a district of a completely different scale and geometry from the medieval quarters. It reads as a different city because it effectively is one.

Flat, and that matters

The avenues sit on a plateau and the gradients are gentle, which after several days on the hills is a genuine relief. Walking distances that would be exhausting in the old town are unremarkable here. For anyone with limited mobility this is one of the more comfortable central areas.

The metro runs beneath much of it, so it is also well connected.

The trees do real work

Continuous street planting drops the temperature on a summer pavement substantially compared with an unshaded street. Several of the avenues have wide central strips that function as linear parks.

Where it helps most, those strips are used for markets, fairs and simply for sitting, and are free. In August the shaded side of an avenue is where everyone walks.

What the district is for

It is largely residential above and commercial below, with offices, embassies, clinics and the everyday services of a working city. That mix means it is busy on weekday mornings and noticeably quiet at weekends, which is the reverse of the historic centre. Cafés here serve the people who work in the buildings, which shows in the prices and the menus.

A set lunch in this district is aimed at office workers rather than at visitors.

The parks at the top

The higher ground north of the avenues holds substantial parks, gardens and open green space. They are used by residents for running, dog walking and weekend picnics rather than by tour groups. Several have viewpoints back over the city that are entirely uncrowded.

In practice, they are also considerably cooler than the streets in summer.

Why it gets skipped

It has few individual monuments and does not photograph as a single recognisable image. Short visits are built around a list of sights, and this district has almost none on that list.

For anyone staying more than a few days it is where the city stops performing and starts functioning. That is precisely the argument for walking it.

If that does not fit your week, it is not a failure of willpower.

Reading the dates off the buildings

The district was built out over roughly a century, so one avenue can run from ornate nineteenth-century apartment blocks through art deco frontages to heavy mid-century state architecture inside a few hundred metres. The earliest blocks carry deep balconies, carved stone surrounds and a shop unit designed into the ground floor, while the deco ones flatten all of that into curved corners, stepped parapets and metal windows. The mid-century public buildings are the easiest to identify, being stone-faced, rigidly symmetrical and deliberately austere, and they tend to occupy the junctions where the plan wanted a landmark.

In practice, dating a street this way shows you where the money and the political attention sat at each stage, which makes for a far more interesting walk than hunting for a monument that is not there.

The takeaway

Walk north from the old town until the ground goes flat. That is where the city works.

The version you keep doing is the version that works.