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City guide · France
Places to visit in Paris, France — page 4
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.
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.
The Tour Saint-Jacques is the last surviving fragment of the church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie, a late-Gothic parish church built between 1509 and 1523 for the guild of Paris butchers, whose market gave the church its name.
The Colonne de Juillet stands at the centre of Place de la Bastille and commemorates the July Revolution of 1830 — the Trois Glorieuses, three days of fighting on 27-29 July that drove King Charles X from the throne.
The Palais de Justice is the historic seat of the French judiciary on the Ile de la Cite, built on the site of the medieval Palais de la Cite, the residence of the Capetian kings from the 10th century until…
Aquarium de Paris occupies the old quarry tunnels beneath the Trocadero hill, first opened as the Aquarium du Trocadero for the 1878 Exposition Universelle, one of the earliest public aquariums built in France.
Pont Mirabeau carries a road and pedestrian walkways across the Seine between the 15th and 16th arrondissements, built between 1893 and 1897 under the chief engineer Paul Rabel using a steel arch design that was, at the time, one of…
Porte Saint-Denis is a triumphal arch built in 1672 on the orders of the city of Paris to honour Louis XIV's military victories on the Rhine, in particular the crossing of the Rhine earlier that year during the Franco-Dutch War.
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.
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.
Maison de Balzac is the house where the novelist Honore de Balzac lived from 1840 to 1847, on rue Raynouard in what was then the village of Passy and is now the 16th arrondissement of Paris.
The Colonne Vendome stands at the centre of Place Vendome in the 1st arrondissement, raised between 1806 and 1810 on Napoleon's order to commemorate the victory at Austerlitz.
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.
Parc Montsouris is a 15.5-hectare public park in the 14th arrondissement, opened in 1878 as part of Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann's programme of large landscaped parks for Paris.
Pont au Change carries rue de Rivoli's continuation across the northern arm of the Seine, linking the Ile de la Cite -- at the Conciergerie and the Palais de Justice -- to the Right Bank at Place du Chatelet.
The Musee d'art et d'histoire du Judaisme, known as the MAHJ, is France's museum of Jewish art and history, opened in 1998 in the Hotel de Saint-Aignan, a 17th-century mansion in the Marais, 3rd arrondissement.
The Petite Ceinture du 16e is a surviving stretch of the Petite Ceinture, the circular railway built between 1852 and 1869 to link Paris's mainline terminus stations for freight and passengers around the edge of the city.
The Musee de l'Armee is France's national army museum, occupying wings of the Hotel des Invalides in the 7th arrondissement, the complex Louis XIV built in the 1670s as a hospital and retirement home for wounded soldiers.
Hotel de Crillon opened as a hotel in 1909, but the building itself is a 1758 royal commission: Louis XV had Ange-Jacques Gabriel build two identical stone palaces flanking the Rue Royale on the new Place de la Concorde, and…
The Musee de l'Homme is France's national anthropology museum, and it studies one subject only: what makes a human being, told through evolution, biological diversity and culture rather than through any single region or period.
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 de la Villette occupies the site of the huge Paris abattoirs and wholesale meat market that Napoleon III had built here in 1867 and that were finally cleared away in 1974, leaving 55.5 hectares of northeastern Paris to redevelop.
Academie de la Grande Chaumiere is an art school founded in 1904 by the Catalan painter Claudio Castelucho on the street of the same name in Montparnasse, near the older Academie Colarossi, and it became a defining institution of the…
Place Dauphine is a triangular square at the western tip of the Ile de la Cite, laid out from 1607 on the orders of Henri IV as the second of his two Paris square projects, after the Place Royale …
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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