🇫🇷France

Notre-Dame de Paris

Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris

Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris is the historic cathedral on Île de la Cité, where the west façade, soaring nave, rose windows and restored liturgical spaces make the building more than a quick photograph stop.

• Must see
• Historic monument
• Paris

Louvre Museum

Musée du Louvre

The Louvre is the most-visited art museum on earth and it was a fortress before it was anything else.

• Must see
• Museum
• Paris

Musée d'Orsay

The Musée d'Orsay is a railway station that outlived its trains. The Gare d'Orsay was built between 1898 and 1900 on the Left Bank for the Exposition Universelle, by Lucien Magne, Émile Bénard and Victor Laloux, in full Beaux-Arts dress.

• Must see
• Museum
• Paris

Père Lachaise Cemetery

Cimetière du Père-Lachaise

Père Lachaise is a working cemetery that became a destination because its managers marketed it.

• Must see
• Historic monument
• Paris

Seine river cruise from the Eiffel Tower

An hour on the Seine is the one piece of organised sightseeing in Paris that earns its place in a self-planned trip.

• Must see
• Activity
• Paris

Arc de Triomphe

Treat the what it is details as provisional when arranging this stop in Paris. Keep enough flexibility to move the visit within the same area if current conditions differ from the plan.

• Must see
• Historic monument
• Paris

Sacré-Cœur

Basilique du Sacré-Cœur

Sacré-Cœur was built as an apology. After France lost the war of 1870, Bishop Felix Fournier proposed a church as an act of national penitence, reading the defeat as divine punishment for the country's moral decline since the Revolution.

• Must see
• Historic monument
• Paris

Palais Garnier

Opéra Garnier

The Palais Garnier is what Napoleon III's Paris looked like when it stopped pretending to be restrained. He commissioned it in 1861, Charles Garnier won the competition, and it was built from 1861 to 1875, opening on 5 January 1875.

• Must see
• Historic monument
• Paris

Sainte Chapelle

Sainte-Chapelle

Sainte-Chapelle is a reliquary the size of a building, and the relic cost more than three times what the building did.

• Must see
• Historic monument
• Paris

avenue des Champs-Élysées

Champs Élysées

The Champs-Élysées is 1.91 km long, 70 m wide, and it is a garden path that became a shopping street. André Le Nôtre laid it out in 1667 as an extension of the Tuileries.

• Must see
• Historic monument
• Paris

Catacombs of Paris

Catacombes de Paris

The Catacombs of Paris hold roughly six million people in a former limestone quarry, moved there because the city's cemeteries had run out of room.

• Must see
• Museum
• Paris

Montparnasse Tower

Tour Montparnasse

Montparnasse Tower is a 210 m office block finished in 1973, and the reaction to it is the reason Paris has not built another skyscraper in its centre since.

• Must see
• Historic monument
• Paris

Champ de Mars

The Champ de Mars is a parade ground that became a lawn, and the Eiffel Tower stands at one end of it.

• Must see
• Historic monument
• Paris

Panthéon

The Panthéon was built as a church and finished just in time to stop being one.

• Must see
• Historic monument
• Paris

Les Invalides

Hôtel des Invalides

Les Invalides was built to house disabled soldiers and ended up housing Napoleon. Louis XIV ordered it on 24 November 1670; Libéral Bruant and Jules Hardouin-Mansart designed it, and it was completed in 1706.

• Must see
• Historic monument
• Paris

place de la Concorde

Place de la Concorde

The Place de la Concorde is a 7.6-hectare traffic island that was once the busiest execution ground in Europe. It is the largest public square in Paris.

• Must see
• Historic monument
• Paris

Grand Palais

Treat the what it is details as provisional when arranging this stop in Paris. Keep enough flexibility to move the visit within the same area if current conditions differ from the plan.

• Must see
• Museum
• Paris

Grand Mosque of Paris

Grande Mosquée de Paris

The Grand Mosque of Paris opened in 1926 as France's thanks to its Muslim soldiers, and it remains the city's central mosque a century later.

• Must see
• Historic monument
• Paris

Tuileries Garden

Jardin des Tuileries

The Tuileries is the first royal garden in Europe that let the public in, and it has outlived the palace it was built for. Catherine de' Medici created it in 1564.

• Must see
• Nature site
• Paris

Conciergerie

The Conciergerie was a royal palace before it was a prison, and the prison is what everyone remembers.

• Must see
• Museum
• Paris

Petit Palais

Petit Palais, Musée des beaux-arts de la Ville de Paris

The Petit Palais was built for the 1900 World's Fair as an exhibition hall and has held the City of Paris's fine arts museum ever since.

• Must see
• Museum
• Paris

Jardin du Luxembourg

The Jardin du Luxembourg is a 23-hectare formal garden on the Left Bank, laid out from 1612 for a queen who wanted a Florentine garden in Paris and built by the French Senate, which still owns the palace at its…

• Must see
• Nature site
• Paris

Palais-Royal

Palais Royal

The Palais-Royal was a cardinal's house that became Europe's first shopping centre and then the place the Revolution started. Jacques Lemercier built it for Cardinal Richelieu between 1633 and 1639 as the Palais-Cardinal.

• Must see
• Historic monument
• Paris

Hôtel de la Marine

Hôtel de la Marine is a paid-ticket monument on Place de la Concorde, one of a matching pair of colonnaded palaces — its twin across the square today houses the Hôtel de Crillon — built between 1758 and 1774 to…

• Must see
• Historic monument
• Paris

Bastille

Ruines de la Bastille

The Bastille is a square where a prison used to be, and the prison held seven people on the day it was stormed.

• Must see
• Historic monument
• Paris

Centre Georges Pompidou

The Centre Pompidou is a building turned inside out, and it is closed until 2030.

• Must see
• Museum
• Paris

National Assembly

Assemblée nationale

The Palais Bourbon is where the National Assembly, the lower house of the French parliament, has sat since the Revolution turned a princess's private mansion into the seat of the republic's elected chamber.

• Must see
• Historic monument
• Paris

Élysée Palace

Palais de l'Élysée

The Élysée Palace is where the President of France lives and works, and it is closed to visitors for all but one weekend a year.

• Must see
• Historic monument
• Paris

Musée des Arts et Métiers

The Musée des Arts et Métiers is Europe's oldest technology museum, founded in 1794 to collect and preserve the machines and instruments of French industry, and it has occupied a former medieval priory ever since.

• Must see
• Museum
• Paris

Luxembourg Palace

Palais du Luxembourg

The Luxembourg Palace is the French Senate, and it was built because a widowed queen was homesick for Florence.

• Must see
• Historic monument
• Paris

Louvre Pyramid

Pyramide du Louvre

The Louvre Pyramid is the glass entrance structure built in the museum's main courtyard in the 1980s, and it is a part of the Louvre — its main entrance and one of the more argued-over additions to central Paris …

• Must see
• Historic monument
• Paris

University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne

Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - Centre Sorbonne

Behind the gate at Place de la Sorbonne sits a university with a name older than most nations: Robert de Sorbon founded a theology college here in 1257 under the patronage of Louis IX, and the word "Sorbonne" has meant…

• Must see
• Historic monument
• Paris

La Madeleine

Église de la Madeleine

La Madeleine is a Greek temple in the middle of Paris, and it took seventy-nine years and several changes of mind to finish.

• Must see
• Historic monument
• Paris

place Vendôme

Place Vendôme

Place Vendôme is an octagon of uniform stone façades built as a single architectural composition, not a collection of separate buildings that happened to end up on the same square.

• Must see
• Historic monument
• Paris

Pont Neuf

The Pont Neuf is the New Bridge and it is the oldest standing bridge in Paris, which has been the joke about it for four hundred years.

• Must see
• Historic monument
• Paris

Château de Vincennes

Château de Vincennes is a medieval fortress on the eastern edge of Paris, beside the Bois de Vincennes.

• Must see
• Historic monument
• Paris

Coulée verte René-Dumont

The Coulée verte René-Dumont is a footpath laid along the top of a disused railway viaduct — a park built above the street rather than beside it.

• Must see
• Nature site
• Paris

bois de Boulogne

Bois de Boulogne

The Bois de Boulogne is a former royal hunting forest turned into an English-style public park, and at 846 hectares it covers more than double the area of New York's Central Park.

• Must see
• Nature site
• Paris

Moulin Rouge

Moulin Rouge is the famous cabaret on Boulevard de Clichy in Pigalle, at the southern foot of Montmartre. Its illuminated red windmill marks a venue closely associated with the French cancan and Parisian nightlife.

• Must see
• Art and culture venue
• Paris

Bataclan

Le Bataclan

The Bataclan is a concert hall of 1,694 seats at 50 Boulevard Voltaire, and it is the site of one of the worst attacks in modern French history.

• Must see
• Art and culture venue
• Paris

Bois de Vincennes

At roughly 995 hectares, the Bois de Vincennes is the largest public park inside Paris, wrapping the eastern edge of the 12th arrondissement.

• Must see
• Nature site
• Paris

Musée de la Vie romantique

Musée de la Vie Romantique

The Musée de la Vie romantique occupies the house and studio of the painter Ary Scheffer, in a district that was the address of Romantic-era Paris rather than a stop added to it later.

• Must see
• Museum
• Paris

Philharmonie de Paris

The Philharmonie de Paris is a concert hall clad in a swirl of aluminium panels shaped like birds in flight, built to give the city's main orchestra a home purpose-built for symphonic sound.

• Must see
• Art and culture venue
• Paris

Opéra Bastille

Opéra Bastille opened on 13 July 1989, timed to the bicentenary of the storming of the Bastille prison, on the footprint of the old Bastille railway station at Place de la Bastille.

• Must see
• Art and culture venue
• Paris

Shakespeare and Company

Shakespeare and Company is an independent English-language bookshop at 37 rue de la Bûcherie on the Left Bank, facing Notre-Dame across the Seine.

• Must see
• Market
• Paris

Marché des Enfants Rouges

Marché couvert des Enfants Rouges

Marché des Enfants Rouges, at 39 rue de Bretagne in the Marais, is the oldest covered market still operating in Paris, tracing back to a walled market built for the neighbourhood in the early seventeenth century under Louis XIII, when…

• Must see
• Market
• Paris

Hôtel de Ville

The Hôtel de Ville is Paris's city hall, seat of the mayor and the city council, on the square that carries its name.

• Must see
• Historic monument
• Paris

Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine

Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine is a museum of French architecture and heritage in the east wing of the Palais de Chaillot at Trocadéro, opened in its current form in 2007.

• Must see
• Museum
• Paris

Musée d'art moderne de Paris

Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris

Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris is the city of Paris's own museum of modern art, occupying the east wing of the Palais de Tokyo on Avenue du Président Wilson.

• Must see
• Museum
• Paris

Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie

Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie sits inside Parc de la Villette in the north-east of Paris and opened in 1986 inside the shell of a large, unfinished cattle-market building from the 1960s that was repurposed for the museum rather…

• Must see
• Museum
• Paris

Musée Rodin

The Musee Rodin occupies the Hotel Biron, an eighteenth-century mansion on Rue de Varenne in the 7th arrondissement that had already passed through use as a convent school before the state let it out cheaply as artists' studios in the…

• Must see
• Museum
• Paris

Musée du quai Branly

The Musee du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac gathers non-Western art and material culture from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas under one roof, a collection that had previously been split between the ethnographic Musee de l'Homme and the Musee…

• Must see
• Museum
• Paris

Musée de l'Orangerie

The Musee de l'Orangerie sits at the western end of the Tuileries Garden, in a building put up in 1852 under Napoleon III to overwinter the garden's orange trees, a purely functional greenhouse rather than a building meant to be…

• Must see
• Museum
• Paris

Chapelle expiatoire

The Chapelle expiatoire is a neoclassical funerary chapel built between 1815 and 1826 on the site of the former Madeleine cemetery, where the guillotined bodies of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were buried in unmarked graves covered with quicklime in…

• Must see
• Historic monument
• Paris

Musée Marmottan Monet

The Musee Marmottan Monet occupies a former hunting lodge built for the Duke of Valmy on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, bought in the late nineteenth century by the businessman Jules Marmottan and later expanded by his son…

• Must see
• Museum
• Paris

Musée Picasso

Musée national Picasso-Paris

The Musee Picasso occupies the Hotel Sale, a seventeenth-century mansion in the Marais built in the 1650s for Pierre Aubert de Fontenay, a salt-tax collector whose unpopular trade gave the building its nickname, sale meaning salted.

• High
• Museum
• Paris

arc de triomphe du Carrousel

Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel

The Arc de triomphe du Carrousel stands in the Cour Napoleon, between the Louvre's wings and I. M.

• High
• Historic monument
• Paris

Bourse de commerce

Bourse de Commerce

The Bourse de Commerce is a Paris contemporary art museum housed in a historic circular building near Les Halles and the Louvre district.

• High
• Museum
• Paris

Louis Vuitton Foundation

Fondation Louis Vuitton

The Fondation Louis Vuitton is a contemporary art museum in the Bois de Boulogne, commissioned by Bernard Arnault, chairman of the luxury group LVMH, and designed by the American architect Frank Gehry.

• High
• Museum
• Paris

Musée Grévin

Musée Grévin is a wax museum on Boulevard Montmartre, opened in 1882.

• High
• Museum
• Paris

Jardin des plantes

Jardin des Plantes

The Jardin des plantes is Paris's main botanical garden and the founding site of the Museum national d'Histoire naturelle, on the Left Bank in the 5th arrondissement, between the Seine and the Austerlitz rail yards.

• High
• Historic monument
• Paris

Chaillot Palace

Palais de Chaillot

The Palais de Chaillot is the curved, colonnaded building on the hill of Trocadero facing the Eiffel Tower across the Seine, built for the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques on the site of the demolished 1878 Palais du…

• High
• Historic monument
• Paris

Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume

Jeu de Paume

The Jeu de Paume is a photography and moving-image gallery in the Tuileries Garden's north-west corner, in a building constructed in 1861 as a court for jeu de paume, the indoor precursor of tennis played by Napoleon III's court.

• High
• Museum
• Paris

Hôtel Matignon

Hôtel de Matignon

The Hotel Matignon is the official residence and working office of the French Prime Minister, on the Rue de Varenne in the 7th arrondissement, and it is not open to the public in any ordinary sense — this is a…

• High
• Historic monument
• Paris

Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris

Tombe du Soldat inconnu

The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is a flat paving stone beneath the Arc de Triomphe, at the centre of Place Charles de Gaulle, marking the grave of an unidentified French soldier from the First World War.

• High
• Historic monument
• Paris

place de la République

Place de la République

Place de la Republique is a large public square straddling the 3rd, 10th and 11th arrondissements, at a junction where several of Paris's grand boulevards meet, and it functions today primarily as a civic gathering space rather than a sightseeing…

• High
• Historic monument
• Paris

Palais Bourbon

The Palais Bourbon, on the Left Bank facing Place de la Concorde across the Seine, is the seat of the French National Assembly, the lower house of Parliament — a working legislature, not a former palace turned museum.

• High
• Historic monument
• Paris

École Militaire

The Ecole Militaire is an operating French military academy, not a museum, and it is not open to the public.

• High
• Historic monument
• Paris

Luxor Obelisk

Obélisque de Louxor

The Luxor Obelisk stands at the centre of Place de la Concorde, a 3,300-year-old pink granite obelisk that once stood at the entrance to Luxor Temple in Egypt, one of a matching pair carved in the reign of Ramesses II.

• High
• Historic monument
• Paris

parc Monceau

Parc Monceau

Parc Monceau began in 1769 as a private pleasure garden for Philippe d'Orleans, Duke of Chartres, laid out by the writer and painter Louis Carrogis, known as Carmontelle, in the English landscape style then fashionable as a counterpoint to the…

• High
• Nature site
• Paris

galerie Vivienne

Galerie Vivienne

Galerie Vivienne is a covered shopping passage, one of the best-preserved of the passages couverts that dotted central Paris in the early 19th century before department stores and Haussmann's boulevards displaced most of them.

• High
• Historic monument
• Paris

Jardin des serres d'Auteuil

Jardin des serres d’Auteuil

The Jardin des serres d'Auteuil is a municipal botanical garden built around a set of glasshouses, on the western edge of Paris beside the Bois de Boulogne.

• High
• Historic monument
• Paris

Guimet Museum

Musée Guimet

The Musee national des Arts asiatiques - Guimet holds the largest collection of Asian art outside Asia itself, spanning Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Tibet, China, Korea, Japan and Southeast Asia in one national museum.

• High
• Museum
• Paris

Palais de Tokyo

The Palais de Tokyo is Paris's largest centre for contemporary art, occupying the eastern wing of a building raised for the 1937 International Exposition by architects Jean-Claude Dondel, Andre Aubert, Paul Viard and Marcel Dastugue.

• High
• Museum
• Paris

Musée Jacquemart-André

Musée Jacquemart-André is a Paris museum housed in the former private mansion of Édouard André and Nélie Jacquemart.

• High
• Museum
• Paris

Arènes de Lutèce

Cavae des Arènes de Lutèce

Arenes de Lutece is the surviving Roman amphitheatre of Lutetia, built in the 1st century AD on the slope of what is now the 5th arrondissement, and it once seated an estimated 15,000 people for gladiator contests and theatre.

• High
• Historic monument
• Paris

Saint-Jacques Tower

Tour Saint-Jacques

The Tour Saint-Jacques is the last surviving fragment of the church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie, a late-Gothic parish church built between 1509 and 1523 for the guild of Paris butchers, whose market gave the church its name.

• High
• Historic monument
• Paris

July Column

Colonne de Juillet

The Colonne de Juillet stands at the centre of Place de la Bastille and commemorates the July Revolution of 1830 — the Trois Glorieuses, three days of fighting on 27-29 July that drove King Charles X from the throne.

• High
• Historic monument
• Paris

Palais de Justice

Palais de Justice de Paris

The Palais de Justice is the historic seat of the French judiciary on the Ile de la Cite, built on the site of the medieval Palais de la Cite, the residence of the Capetian kings from the 10th century until…

• Notable
• Historic monument
• Paris

Aquarium de Paris

Aquarium de Paris - Cinéaqua

Aquarium de Paris occupies the old quarry tunnels beneath the Trocadero hill, first opened as the Aquarium du Trocadero for the 1878 Exposition Universelle, one of the earliest public aquariums built in France.

• Notable
• Family attraction
• Paris

Pont Mirabeau

Pont Mirabeau carries a road and pedestrian walkways across the Seine between the 15th and 16th arrondissements, built between 1893 and 1897 under the chief engineer Paul Rabel using a steel arch design that was, at the time, one of…

• Notable
• Historic monument
• Paris

Porte Saint-Denis

Porte Saint-Denis is a triumphal arch built in 1672 on the orders of the city of Paris to honour Louis XIV's military victories on the Rhine, in particular the crossing of the Rhine earlier that year during the Franco-Dutch War.

• Notable
• Historic monument
• Paris

Musée Carnavalet

Musee Carnavalet is the museum of the history of Paris, occupying two adjoining Marais mansions: the Hotel Carnavalet, built in the 16th century and remodelled by Francois Mansart in 1655, and the neighbouring Hotel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau.

• Notable
• Museum
• Paris

Musée de Cluny

Musée de Cluny, formally the Musée national du Moyen Âge, brings together Roman archaeology, a late-medieval residence and medieval art in one compact Latin Quarter site.

• Notable
• Museum
• Paris

Maison de Balzac

Maison de Balzac is the house where the novelist Honore de Balzac lived from 1840 to 1847, on rue Raynouard in what was then the village of Passy and is now the 16th arrondissement of Paris.

• Notable
• Museum
• Paris

Colonne Vendôme

The Colonne Vendome stands at the centre of Place Vendome in the 1st arrondissement, raised between 1806 and 1810 on Napoleon's order to commemorate the victory at Austerlitz.

• Notable
• Historic monument
• Paris

Muséum national d'histoire naturelle

The Museum national d'histoire naturelle is France's national natural history museum, founded in 1793 out of the royal Jardin du Roi, and it occupies several linked sites across the Jardin des Plantes in the 5th arrondissement.

• Notable
• Museum
• Paris

parc Montsouris

Parc Montsouris

Parc Montsouris is a 15.5-hectare public park in the 14th arrondissement, opened in 1878 as part of Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann's programme of large landscaped parks for Paris.

• Notable
• Historic monument
• Paris

pont au Change

Pont au Change

Pont au Change carries rue de Rivoli's continuation across the northern arm of the Seine, linking the Ile de la Cite -- at the Conciergerie and the Palais de Justice -- to the Right Bank at Place du Chatelet.

• Notable
• Historic monument
• Paris

Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme

The Musee d'art et d'histoire du Judaisme, known as the MAHJ, is France's museum of Jewish art and history, opened in 1998 in the Hotel de Saint-Aignan, a 17th-century mansion in the Marais, 3rd arrondissement.

• Notable
• Museum
• Paris

Petite Ceinture du 16e

The Petite Ceinture du 16e is a surviving stretch of the Petite Ceinture, the circular railway built between 1852 and 1869 to link Paris's mainline terminus stations for freight and passengers around the edge of the city.

• Notable
• Nature site
• Paris

Musée de l'Armée

The Musee de l'Armee is France's national army museum, occupying wings of the Hotel des Invalides in the 7th arrondissement, the complex Louis XIV built in the 1670s as a hospital and retirement home for wounded soldiers.

• Notable
• Museum
• Paris

Hôtel de Crillon

Hotel de Crillon opened as a hotel in 1909, but the building itself is a 1758 royal commission: Louis XV had Ange-Jacques Gabriel build two identical stone palaces flanking the Rue Royale on the new Place de la Concorde, and…

• Notable
• Historic monument
• Paris

Musée de l'Homme

The Musee de l'Homme is France's national anthropology museum, and it studies one subject only: what makes a human being, told through evolution, biological diversity and culture rather than through any single region or period.

• Notable
• Museum
• Paris

parc des Buttes-Chaumont

Parc des Buttes-Chaumont

Parc des Buttes-Chaumont sits on ground that had no reason to become a park: a bare, chemically poor hill called Chauve-Mont that once held the Gibbet of Montfaucon, where hanged criminals were displayed from the thirteenth century until 1760, and…

• Notable
• Nature site
• Paris

Galeries Lafayette Champs-Élysées

Galeries Lafayette

This is the group's newest flagship, not the domed department store on Boulevard Haussmann most visitors picture at the name Galeries Lafayette.

• Notable
• Market
• Paris

parc de la Villette

Parc de la Villette

Parc de la Villette occupies the site of the huge Paris abattoirs and wholesale meat market that Napoleon III had built here in 1867 and that were finally cleared away in 1974, leaving 55.5 hectares of northeastern Paris to redevelop.

• Notable
• Nature site
• Paris

Académie de la Grande Chaumière

Academie de la Grande Chaumiere is an art school founded in 1904 by the Catalan painter Claudio Castelucho on the street of the same name in Montparnasse, near the older Academie Colarossi, and it became a defining institution of the…

• Notable
• Historic monument
• Paris

place Dauphine

Place Dauphine

Place Dauphine is a triangular square at the western tip of the Ile de la Cite, laid out from 1607 on the orders of Henri IV as the second of his two Paris square projects, after the Place Royale …

• Notable
• Nature site
• Paris