Which river runs through Paris?

The Seine rises in Burgundy, loops northwest across the Paris basin and reaches the English Channel at Le Havre, and Paris exists because of it. The original settlement was on the Île de la Cité, an island in the river that was easy to defend and offered a natural crossing point, and the Roman town of Lutetia grew from that. The river fixed the city's shape ever afterward: the Right Bank became the commercial and later administrative side, the Left Bank the scholarly quarter around the university, and the stone embankments built over centuries turned the waterway into the axis that Notre-Dame, the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay and the Eiffel Tower all address. Because the Seine falls very gently and is navigable a long way inland, barges have carried freight to Paris since antiquity, and Le Havre and Rouen downstream function effectively as the capital's seaports.

The banks of the Seine through central Paris are listed together as a single World Heritage site.