Smart Self-Managed Tours

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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25 places match
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Category

Historic monuments 1684 Museums 6 Places of worship 479 Nature sites 697 Viewpoints 27 Food and drink 147 Markets and shopping 254 Entertainment 0 Nightlife 0 Family attractions 0 Art and culture 1878 Activities 1

Typical visit duration

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

Interests

History 2171 Art 2357 Museums 1884 Nature 724 Sea and beach 697 Viewpoints 27
  1. Notre-Dame de Paris
    01 1 hour

    Notre-Dame de Paris

    Notre-Dame is the cathedral of Paris and it burned down five years before it reopened.

    • Must see
    • Historic monument
    • Paris 4e Arrondissement
  2. Seine river cruise from the Eiffel Tower
    02 1 hour

    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 7e Arrondissement
  3. Arc de Triomphe
    03 1 hour

    Arc de Triomphe

    The Arc de Triomphe is Napoleon's victory monument and it took thirty years, by which time he was dead.

    • Must see
    • Historic monument
    • Paris 16e Arrondissement
  4. Sacré-Cœur
    04 45 min

    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 18e Arrondissement
  5. Sainte Chapelle
    05 45 min

    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 1er Arrondissement
  6. avenue des Champs-Élysées
    06 45 min

    avenue des Champs-Élysées

    The Champs-Élysées is 1.91 km long, 70 m wide, and it is a garden path that became a shopping street.

    • Must see
    • Historic monument
    • Paris 8e Arrondissement
  7. Bastille
    07 20 min

    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 4e Arrondissement
  8. Catacombs of Paris
    08 1 hour

    Catacombs of 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 14e Arrondissement
  9. Montparnasse Tower
    09 1 hour

    Montparnasse Tower

    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 15e Arrondissement
  10. Champ de Mars
    10 45 min

    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 7e Arrondissement
  11. Panthéon
    11 1 hour

    Panthéon

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

    • Must see
    • Historic monument
    • Paris 5e Arrondissement
  12. place de la Concorde
    12 20 min

    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 8e Arrondissement
  13. Grand Mosque of Paris
    13 45 min

    Grand Mosque of 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 5e Arrondissement
  14. Tuileries Garden
    14 1 hour

    Tuileries Garden

    The Tuileries is the first royal garden in Europe that let the public in, and it has outlived the palace it was built for.

    • Must see
    • Nature site
    • Paris 1er Arrondissement
  15. Luxembourg Palace
    15 20 min

    Luxembourg Palace

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

    • Must see
    • Historic monument
    • Paris 6e Arrondissement
  16. Jardin du Luxembourg
    16 1 hour

    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
    • Historic monument
    • Paris 6e Arrondissement
  17. Louvre Pyramid
    17 20 min

    Louvre Pyramid

    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 1er Arrondissement
  18. Palais-Royal
    18 45 min

    Palais-Royal

    The Palais-Royal was a cardinal's house that became Europe's first shopping centre and then the place the Revolution started.

    • Must see
    • Historic monument
    • Paris 1er Arrondissement
  19. University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne
    19 1 hour

    University of Paris 1 Pantheon-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 5e Arrondissement
  20. La Madeleine
    20 30 min

    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 8e Arrondissement
  21. place Vendôme
    21 20 min

    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 1er Arrondissement
  22. Pont Neuf
    22 20 min

    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 1er Arrondissement
  23. Coulée verte René-Dumont
    23 1 hour

    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 12e Arrondissement
  24. Bataclan
    24 15 min

    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 11e Arrondissement
  25. Musée de la Vie romantique
    25 1 hour

    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 9e 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