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City guide · France
Historic sites in Paris, France
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 ins...
Editorial responsibility: Elena Voss
· Roavina Travel Editor
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.
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.
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.
Open daily, generally 10:00-23:00 April-September and 10:00-22:30 October-March, with Tuesday openings from 11:00; last entry is 45 minutes before closing. An accessible route serves principal lower or public areas, but stairs, historic fabric or summit routes limit the complete circuit.
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.
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.
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.
Le Marais, "the marsh", is a historic district spread across parts of the 3rd and 4th arrondissements on the Right Bank of the Seine. Once an aristocratic quarter, it keeps many buildings of historic and architectural importance.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
Suggested stay for a first visit: 4–5 days. Group the central landmarks across the first days, then leave separate time for a major museum and Montmartre or another Paris district. Versailles lies outside the city and needs an additional excursion day if chosen.
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.
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