Zimmer [9] proved that, on a compact manifold, a foliation with a dense leaf, a suitable leafwise Riemannian symmetric metric and a transverse Lie structure has arithmetic holonomy group. In this work we improve such result for totally geodesic foliations by showing that the manifold itself is arithmetic. This also gives a positive answer, for some special cases, to a conjecture of E. Ghys [5] .