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City guide · France
Places to visit in Paris, France — page 2
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...
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 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.
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.
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 …
Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - Centre 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…
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 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.
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.
Marché des Enfants Rouges, at 39 rue de Bretagne in the Marais, is the oldest covered market still operating in Paris, tracing back to a walled market built for the neighbourhood in the early seventeenth century under Louis XIII, when…
Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine is a museum of French architecture and heritage in the east wing of the Palais de Chaillot at Trocadéro, opened in its current form in 2007.
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.
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.
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.
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