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City guide · France

Paris

A photograph of Paris
Photograph · Yann Caradec from Paris, France · CC BY-SA 2.0

Paris is 105.4 km² holding 2,047,602 people, wrapped in twenty arrondissements that spiral outward from the Louvre. Almost everything a visitor comes for is inside that spiral, and most of it is walkable. The Seine cuts the city in two and everything is described in relation to it. The Right Bank to the north holds the commerce and the great institutions; the Left Bank to the south holds the universities and the bookshops. Between them the Île de la Cité and the Île Saint-Louis are where the city started.

Practical information
Language spoken
French
English is understood in tourist districts and rarely outside them
Dialling code
+33 1
Paris and the Île-de-France; drop the leading 0 of 01 when calling from abroad
Currency
Euro (€, EUR)
Cards accepted almost everywhere; markets prefer cash
Emergency number
112
One number across the country; 15 reaches an ambulance directly
Plug type
Type C and E · 230 V
European two-pin; type E adds an earth pin in the socket
Tap water
Safe to drink
Held to the European drinking water directive

Planning a visit

Suggested stay
4–5 days
Getting around
Métro and on foot
  1. January: seasonal closure recorded
  2. February: seasonal closure recorded
  3. March: seasonal closure recorded
  4. April: recorded as a best month to visit
  5. May: recorded as a best month to visit
  6. June: recorded as a best month to visit
  7. July: no seasonality data recorded
  8. August: no seasonality data recorded — this month
  9. September: recorded as a best month to visit
  10. October: recorded as a best month to visit
  11. November: seasonal closure recorded
  12. December: seasonal closure recorded

Top things to see

Ranked by importance — sitelinks, pageviews and heritage status, not editor preference.

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Category

Historic monuments 10 Museums 135 Places of worship 0 Nature sites 4 Viewpoints 0 Food and drink 0 Markets and shopping 0 Entertainment 103 Nightlife 2108 Family attractions 8 Art and culture 2 Activities 0

Typical visit duration

Up to 1 hour 5173 1 to 2 hours 2370 Half a day or more 9

Interests

History 145 Art 2 Museums 137 Nature 4 Sea and beach 4 Viewpoints 0
  1. Eiffel Tower
    01 2 hours

    Eiffel Tower

    The Eiffel Tower was built to stand for twenty years and be taken down.

    • Must see
    • Historic monument
    • Paris 7e Arrondissement
  2. Père Lachaise Cemetery
    02 1 hr 30 min

    Père Lachaise Cemetery

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

    • Must see
    • Historic monument
    • Paris 20e Arrondissement
  3. Palais Garnier
    03 1 hr 30 min

    Palais 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 9e Arrondissement
  4. Centre Georges Pompidou
    04 2 hours

    Centre Georges Pompidou

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

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Paris 4e Arrondissement
  5. National Assembly
    05 1 hr 30 min

    National Assembly

    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 7e Arrondissement
  6. Élysée Palace
    06 1 hr 30 min

    Élysée Palace

    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 8e Arrondissement
  7. Grand Palais
    07 2 hours

    Grand Palais

    The Grand Palais is a glass hall built for a world's fair and never demolished. Construction began in 1897 after the Palais de l'Industrie was pulled down, and it opened on 1 May 1900 for the Exposition Universelle.

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Paris 8e Arrondissement
  8. Conciergerie
    08 1 hr 15 min

    Conciergerie

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

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Paris 1er Arrondissement
  9. Petit Palais
    09 1 hr 30 min

    Petit Palais

    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 8e Arrondissement
  10. Musée des Arts et Métiers
    10 2 hours

    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 3e Arrondissement
  11. Château de Vincennes
    11 1 hr 30 min

    Château de Vincennes

    Château de Vincennes is a medieval fortress with the tallest surviving keep of any in Europe, built to keep a king safe rather than to look like a palace.

    • Must see
    • Historic monument
    • Paris 12e Arrondissement
  12. bois de Boulogne
    12 2 hours

    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 16e Arrondissement
  13. Moulin Rouge
    13 2 hours

    Moulin Rouge

    A red windmill on a Pigalle façade marks the cabaret that turned the French cancan into a Paris export.

    • Must see
    • Art and culture venue
    • Paris 18e Arrondissement
  14. Bois de Vincennes
    14 2 hours

    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 12e Arrondissement
  15. Opéra Bastille
    15 1 hr 30 min

    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 12e Arrondissement
  16. Hôtel de la Marine
    16 2 hours

    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 8e Arrondissement
  17. Musée d'art moderne de Paris
    17 1 hr 30 min

    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 16e Arrondissement
  18. Musée Rodin
    18 2 hours

    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 7e Arrondissement
  19. Musée du quai Branly
    19 2 hours

    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 7e Arrondissement
  20. Musée de l'Orangerie
    20 1 hr 15 min

    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 1er Arrondissement
  21. Musée Marmottan Monet
    21 1 hr 30 min

    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 16e Arrondissement
  22. Musée Picasso
    22 1 hr 30 min

    Musée Picasso

    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.

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Paris 3e Arrondissement
  23. Louis Vuitton Foundation
    23 2 hours

    Louis Vuitton Foundation

    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.

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Paris 16e Arrondissement
  24. Musée Grévin
    24 1 hr 30 min

    Musée Grévin

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

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Paris 9e Arrondissement
  25. Jardin des plantes
    25 1 hr 15 min

    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.

    • Must see
    • Historic monument
    • Paris 5e Arrondissement

Source: OpenStreetMap contributors, Wikidata ·

Where to base yourself

District boundaries come from OSM administrative relations, so a district page holds exactly the places inside it — plus, for the islands and the coast, the nearest district by proximity.

How the city is laid out

The arrondissements spiral clockwise from the centre: the 1st sits at the Louvre and the Île de la Cité, and the numbers wind outward to the 20th. Learning that shape is the single most useful thing a first-time visitor can do, because every address in the city carries its arrondissement and the number tells you roughly where you are.

The Right Bank — north of the Seine — is the 1st through 4th at the centre, then the grand avenues of the 8th and 16th to the west and Montmartre in the 18th to the north. The Louvre, the Champs-Élysées, the Opéra and Sacré-Cœur are all Right Bank.

The Left Bank — south — is the 5th, 6th and 7th: the Latin Quarter, Saint-Germain, the Panthéon, the Musée d'Orsay and the Eiffel Tower. It is the older-feeling half and the one with the bookshops.

The Périphérique, completed in 1973, rings the whole of it. Inside is Paris; outside is the metropolitan area of 13,320,752 people across 18,940.7 km², which is a different thing.

Checked 2026-08-23

Getting around

The Métro, and then walking. Paris is small enough that the two together cover everything.

The Métro opened on 19 July 1900 during the World's Fair and now runs 16 lines — numbered 1 to 14 plus 3bis and 7bis — across 321 stations, 61 of which are interchanges. Stations sit 548 m apart on average, which is why a Métro journey of two stops is usually a walk. It carries 1.523 billion passengers a year, 4.17 million a day.

The RER extends further out into the suburbs and is what takes you to the airports and to Versailles. Châtelet–Les Halles, where five Métro lines meet three RER lines, is the largest interchange and the one to avoid at rush hour.

Single tickets and multi-use passes are both sold, and the Navigo Easy card is the contactless option.

Checked 2026-08-23

Common questions

How many days does Paris need?

Four to five. Three days covers the central monuments — the Louvre, Notre-Dame, the Eiffel Tower, the Champs-Élysées — at a pace that is not punishing. A fourth adds a proper museum day, and a fifth adds Montmartre or a day out at Versailles.

How do the arrondissements work?

They spiral clockwise from the centre. The 1st is at the Louvre and the Île de la Cité and the numbers wind outward to the 20th. Every Paris address carries its arrondissement, so the number tells you roughly where something is.

What is the difference between the Right Bank and the Left Bank?

The Seine. The Right Bank to the north holds the commerce and the great institutions — the Louvre, the Champs-Élysées, the Opéra, Montmartre. The Left Bank to the south holds the universities, the Latin Quarter, the Panthéon, the Musée d'Orsay and the Eiffel Tower.

Is the Métro the best way around?

For anything over a kilometre, yes. It opened on 19 July 1900 and runs 16 lines across 321 stations, with stations 548 m apart on average — which means a two-stop journey is usually faster on foot.

When is the best time to come?

April to June and September to October. August is when Parisians leave and tourists arrive, which is the worst of both — shuttered restaurants and full museums.

How big is Paris really?

The city proper is 105.4 km² with 2,047,602 people, ringed by the Périphérique completed in 1973. The metropolitan area outside it holds 13,320,752 people across 18,940.7 km².

Turn this list into a plan

Set your days, your pace and the hours you actually want to be out. The planner works around closing days and travel time, and leaves room to eat.

Plan Paris