City guide · 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...
Photograph · Yann Caradec from Paris, France · CC BY-SA 2.0
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.
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.
Checked 2026-08-23
November · November averages only 10.4°C by day in Paris, with 51.9 mm precipitation across about ten days.
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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.
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.
Montmartre is a 130-metre hill in the northern 18th arrondissement of Paris that gives its name to the surrounding district on the Right Bank.
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.
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.
Sainte-Chapelle
Sainte-Chapelle is a reliquary the size of a building, and the relic cost more than three times what the building did.
Chapelle Notre-Dame de la Médaille Miraculeuse
The Chapel of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal is a Roman Catholic Marian shrine at 140 Rue du Bac in Paris.
The Panthéon was built as a church and finished just in time to stop being one.
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.
The Place des Vosges, originally the Place Royale, is the oldest planned square in 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…
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.
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.
The Atelier des Lumières is a digital art centre at 38 rue Saint-Maur in Paris's 11th arrondissement.
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.
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.
The Canal Saint-Martin is a 4.6 km canal in Paris linking the Canal de l'Ourcq to the Seine. Napoleon I ordered it in 1802 and it was built until 1825 to bring fresh water and goods into the city.
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.
The Hôtel de Ville is Paris's city hall, seat of the mayor and the city council, on the square that carries its name.
Galeries Lafayette
Galeries Lafayette Paris Haussmann is a department store at 40 boulevard Haussmann in the 9th arrondissement of Paris.
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…
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…
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.
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.
An hour on the Seine is the one piece of organised sightseeing in Paris that earns its place in a self-planned trip.
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.
Checked 2026-08-23
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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