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City guide · France
Theme: Museums 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.
The Musée d'Orsay is a railway station that outlived its trains. The Gare d'Orsay was built between 1898 and 1900 on the Left Bank for the Exposition Universelle, by Lucien Magne, Émile Bénard and Victor Laloux, in full Beaux-Arts dress.
Grand Palais exhibitions and events use date-specific hours; the building has no single continuous sightseeing timetable. Step-free entrances or public approaches, lifts where required, and accessible toilets serve principal visitor areas.
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…
Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie sits inside Parc de la Villette in the north-east of Paris and opened in 1986 inside the shell of a large, unfinished cattle-market building from the 1960s that was repurposed for the museum rather…
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.
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…
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…
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.
Musee Carnavalet is the museum of the history of Paris, occupying two adjoining Marais mansions: the Hotel Carnavalet, built in the 16th century and remodelled by Francois Mansart in 1655, and the neighbouring Hotel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau.
The Museum national d'histoire naturelle is France's national natural history museum, founded in 1793 out of the royal Jardin du Roi, and it occupies several linked sites across the Jardin des Plantes in the 5th arrondissement.
Musée de Cluny, formally the Musée national du Moyen Âge, brings together Roman archaeology, a late-medieval residence and medieval art in one compact Latin Quarter site.
The Musee national des Arts asiatiques - Guimet holds the largest collection of Asian art outside Asia itself, spanning Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Tibet, China, Korea, Japan and Southeast Asia in one national museum.
The Institut du Monde arabe is a cultural institute in Paris dedicated to the Arab world. It was established as a joint initiative between France and twenty Arab nations to promote cultural exchange and mutual understanding.
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.
Moulin Rouge is the famous cabaret on Boulevard de Clichy in Pigalle, at the southern foot of Montmartre. Its illuminated red windmill marks a venue closely associated with the French cancan and Parisian nightlife.
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.
The Philharmonie de Paris is a concert hall clad in a swirl of aluminium panels shaped like birds in flight, built to give the city's main orchestra a home purpose-built for symphonic sound.
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.
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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