Jardins de la Ligne, Toulouse

Les Jardins de la Ligne are a 2.5-hectare public space located along the former Montaudran airport runway that aviators St-Exupéry, Mermoz and Daurat used in the 1930s to distribute airmail between Europe and South America. This Aéropostale line thus marks the beginning of the aerial adventure in Toulouse.

As the first large park created in the new district, it has since its completion enabled the first inhabitants to enjoy a real meeting space with games, but also an island of freshness near the large mineral space of the Piste. Listed as a Historic Monument as a “horizontal monument”, this former airfield runway is the major and unifying public space that marks the identity of this district under construction. The park faces the large Halle which hosts François Delarozière's Machines, which give the district a unique cultural and touristic identity with the regular wanderings of the Minotaur and the Spider on the track.

Delivered in 2018, these gardens express the idea of the landscapes crossed by airmen, thanks to the implementation of a particular topography and the use of plants adapted to xerophilic and hydrophilic environments. Indeed, these gardens play an important ecological role because they store all the rainwater (3500 m3) for a fifty-year occurrence of a catchment area of 6.7 hectares. The water discharged into these gardens gradually infiltrates over varying periods of time, from one day to one week. We thus had the rare opportunity to work on the staging of an enclosed garden which was made possible by the need to use the gardens as storm basins for the neighborhood.

Here, the landscapes of the countries crossed by the Aéropostale Line are given to see from the preserved Aéropostale Runway, or from the pedestrian footbridges which cross it. The visitor goes from Chile to Brazil, from Morocco to Spain thanks to the plantations and the substrates specifically put in place.

The park won the Golden Victory for Park category at the “Victoires du Paysage” in 2022: https://www.lesvictoiresdupaysage.com/