For a July midday session at Court Simonne-Mathieu, the sun sits 54° up in the south-east as play begins, so shade means the covered stands, a closed retractable roof, or waiting for the sun to drop behind the far stand. Sunset is 9:49 PM local, so an evening session gets real shade as the sun drops. By 7:05 PM the sun is only 24° up in the west, 165 minutes from setting.
Check the sun for YOUR match →We know this court's orientation and roof, but not a verified seat-by-seat map, so we won't colour individual sections. What's above is exact: the sun's astronomical position for the court's coordinates and timezone. The interactive page adds the live sun compass, sunset against session time, and the hour-by-hour forecast.
Sun & sunset check for Court Simonne-Mathieu · Satellite shadow view
They built a tennis court inside a botanical garden. Court Simonne-Mathieu, opened in 2019 at the edge of the Roland-Garros grounds in Paris, sits sunken into the earth of the Jardin des Serres d'Auteuil, ringed by glasshouses full of plants, a setting no other Grand Slam court can match. It seats 5,000, it has no roof, and its shade story is written by the greenhouses and the ground itself.
The court runs almost exactly due north-south, its long axis bears about 2 degrees, which is the textbook tennis orientation: neither server ever looks into a rising or setting sun. More important for spectators, the whole arena sits below grade. Because the court is sunken, the surrounding structure and the tall glasshouses around the rim throw shade onto the seating earlier than a freestanding stadium of this size ever would. The north and east sides benefit first, picking up shadow from the structures while other sections are still in full light.
The south-facing seats are the opposite case. On a clear afternoon around the French Open's late-May and early-June dates, they collect the most sun in Court Simonne-Mathieu, facing into the light for the long middle of the day. With the midday sun standing 54 degrees high in the southeast over Paris, no section escapes entirely at noon, but the gap between the sheltered north and east sides and the exposed south-facing rows is real, and it widens through the afternoon.
Like everywhere at Roland-Garros, Court Simonne-Mathieu lives with very long days. High-summer sunset in Paris comes around 9:49 PM, and at 7 PM the sun is still 24 degrees up, due west, so a late-afternoon match does not glide straight into shade the way it would in a city with earlier sunsets. The sunken bowl helps, since the sun has to stay fairly high to reach over the rim and the greenhouses, but west-reaching light will still find some seats into the early evening before the garden setting finally swallows it.
Paris in tournament season is usually temperate rather than punishing, so this is less about surviving heat than about comfort over a three-set stay. A hat and sunscreen cover the midday risk; by late afternoon the court is one of the most pleasant places on the grounds to watch clay-court tennis, with the glasshouses filtering the light and the crowd close to the action. The garden walk out afterward, in the last of the evening light, is its own reward.
If you are choosing seats at Court Simonne-Mathieu, aim north or east for the earliest shade, accept the south-facing rows only with sun protection in hand, and treat a late slot on the order of play as the comfortable one. For the precise shadow pattern on the day you are visiting, the interactive shade map shows how the greenhouses and the sunken bowl trade sun and shade hour by hour.
Upcoming events at Court Simonne-Mathieu are ticketed on TixBit.