Louvre Museum

Inside this site

Recorded for arc de triomphe du Carrousel, not for this site as a whole. View arc de triomphe du Carrousel's guide

Recorded for Louvre Palace, not for this site as a whole. View Louvre Palace's guide

Recorded for Louvre Pyramid, not for this site as a whole. View Louvre Pyramid's guide

What it is

The Louvre is the most-visited art museum on earth and it was a fortress before it was anything else. Philip II built it in the late twelfth century to defend Paris; Francis I converted it into the kings' main residence in 1546; Louis XIV left for Versailles in 1682 and the palace began filling with the royal collections instead of the court.

It opened as a public museum on 10 August 1793 with 537 paintings and 184 objects, mostly royal and confiscated church property. It shut again from 1796 to 1801 because the building was structurally unsound.

It now holds around 500,000 objects, shows 35,000 of them across more than 60,600 m², and took 9.0 million visitors in 2025.

Checked 2026-08-23 · Source

What's inside

Eight departments, and the two objects everyone photographs.

The departments are Egyptian Antiquities, Near Eastern Antiquities, Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities, Islamic Art, Sculpture, Decorative Arts, Paintings, and Prints and Drawings. Only the Paintings department is what most visitors picture when they say Louvre.

The Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo are the two the crowds form around, and neither rewards the wait — the Mona Lisa is small, behind glass, and seen over several hundred phone screens.

The building is the other exhibit. I. M. Pei designed the glass pyramid in 1984; the spaces around it were inaugurated on 15 October 1988 and the underground lobby opened on 30 March 1989.

Checked 2026-08-23 · Source

How long to spend

Three hours, and pick a department rather than a route.

Thirty-five thousand works on display across 60,600 m² cannot be walked in a day, and trying produces exhaustion rather than memory. Choosing one department — the Egyptian rooms, the Italian paintings, the sculpture courts — and giving it three hours is the visit that works.

The Mona Lisa costs forty minutes of queuing for ninety seconds of view. Whether that is worth it is a question about you rather than about the painting.

Checked 2026-08-23 · Source

Season and crowds

Late afternoon on a late-opening evening, or first thing on a weekday. Not Tuesday, when it is closed.

The museum takes nine million people a year and the middle of the day is when they are all there. Evening openings are the least crowded hours the Louvre has.

April to June and September to October are Paris's comfortable months and the museum's busiest. January and February are the quietest and the galleries are warm.

Checked 2026-08-23 · Source

Tickets

The Louvre charges admission and timed slots are booked in advance. The figure shown on this page is the one currently published.

The pyramid is the main entrance and the longest queue. Other entrances exist and are quieter, and which are open changes.

The Paris Museum Pass covers the Louvre, which is worth weighing against how many other collections are on your route — the Orsay, the Pompidou, Sainte-Chapelle and the Conciergerie are all separately ticketed otherwise.

Checked 2026-08-23 · Source

Getting there

The 1st arrondissement, on the Right Bank between the Tuileries and the Seine.

Palais Royal–Musée du Louvre on Métro lines 1 and 7 comes up inside the Carrousel entrance, which avoids the pyramid queue entirely. Louvre–Rivoli on line 1 is the other stop.

The Métro runs 16 lines across 321 stations, with stations 548 m apart on average — a two-stop journey is usually faster walked.

Checked 2026-08-23 · Source

What to watch out for

Closed on Tuesdays. Timed entry is booked in advance and turning up without a slot in season means not getting in.

The pyramid is the most photogenic entrance and the slowest. The Carrousel entrance from the Métro is usually faster.

The scale defeats people. Three hours of galleries is physically hard, the floors are stone, and the café queues are as long as everything else. Sitting down before you need to is the difference between a good visit and a bad one.

The Mona Lisa room is a crush and a pickpocket environment. Bags forward.

Large bags are not admitted and the cloakroom fills.

Checked 2026-08-23 · Source

Photography

The pyramid is the photograph and it has been taken several million times. The version that is still worth making is from inside the lobby looking up through the glass at the palace, rather than from the courtyard looking at the pyramid.

In the galleries, flash is prohibited and the lighting is good. The sculpture courts under glass roofs are the best-lit rooms in the building and the least photographed.

The Mona Lisa cannot be photographed well — it is small, glazed, roped at a distance and surrounded by phones. Photograph the crowd instead; it is the more honest picture.

Some temporary exhibitions prohibit photography entirely and are signed.

Checked 2026-08-23 · Source

Where it is

• 1 hour

  1 min walk · Paris 1er Arrondissement

  Le Café Richelieu

  • Notable
  • Restaurant or café
• 1 hour

  1 min walk · Paris 1er Arrondissement

  Le Café Marly

  • Notable
  • Restaurant or café
• 3 hours

  1 min walk · Paris 1er Arrondissement

  Louvre Palace

  • Must see · Heritage site
  • Historic monument

External links

• Official site
• +33 1 40 20 52 29
• View on Wikidata