Watch the Evolution of Paris Unfold in a Timelapse Video, from 300 BCE to 2025

Though it’s easily forgotten in our age of air travel and instantaneous global communication, many a great city is located where it is because of a river. That holds true everywhere from London to Buenos Aires to Tokyo to New York — and even to Los Angeles, despite its own once-uncontrollable river having long since been turned into a much-ridiculed concrete drainage channel. But no urban waterway has been quite so romanticized for quite so long as the Seine, which runs through the middle of Paris.