Paris — A famous landmark in the French capital looked very different Thursday morning. The iconic Moulin Rouge’s sails fell to the ground overnight, leaving the red windmill looking unusually bare.
The owners of the entertainment venue said it was unclear how the candles fell, taking with them the first three letters of the Moulin Rouge sign, but they promised to repair the structure and said there was no further damage.
The rooftop bar behind the windmill closed at midnight and the last cabaret show ended an hour later, and the structure was still intact at the time.
Benoît Tessier/REUTERS
“It’s sad, just sad,” Danish tourist Lars Thygesen said Thursday as he looked at the building.
“I hope they rebuild it again, so that it is like always, the old Moulin Rouge,” added his partner Lise.
Moulin Rouge director Jean-Victor Clerico said there were no signs of intentional damage and that the collapse was “obviously a technical problem.”
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“We will rise to the challenge,” Clerico said, according to the French news agency AFP. “The Moulin Rouge is 135 years old, so all kinds of things have been seen.”
The incident comes just about three months before the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Summer Olympicswhich is expected to attract millions of visitors to the city.
The Moulin Rouge’s famous daily cabaret shows attract hundreds of thousands of visitors each year and, as AFP notes, thousands more stop to admire and take photographs of the peculiar building at the foot of Paris’s Montmartre hill from the outside.