Country guide
France is 18 regions and 632,702 km2, and five of those regions are overseas - French Guiana in South America, the French West Indies, islands in the Indian and...
Photograph · Pierre Blaché · CC0
Reviewed by Elena Voss · Roavina Travel Editor
France is 18 regions and 632,702 km2, and five of those regions are overseas - French Guiana in South America, the French West Indies, islands in the Indian and Pacific oceans. Metropolitan France alone runs from the Rhine to the Atlantic and from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, so a week here is a choice rather than a circuit. Of the 69.1 million people estimated in 2026, more than 13 million are in the Paris metropolitan area, which is why the capital tends to win the first visit. The corners - Alpine, Atlantic, Mediterranean - are further from one another than the map's familiarity suggests.
Checked 2026-08-25
Every city catalogued in this country so far, ranked by how much there is to see.
Photograph · Yann Caradec from Paris, France · CC BY-SA 2.0
Seasonal closures come from recorded opening hours.
Ranked by importance — sitelinks, pageviews and heritage status, not editor preference.
69 places match
Category
Typical visit duration
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.
Treat the what it is details as provisional when arranging this stop in Paris. Keep enough flexibility to move the visit within the same area if current conditions differ from the plan.
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.
Sainte-Chapelle
Sainte-Chapelle is a reliquary the size of a building, and the relic cost more than three times what the building did.
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.
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.
Tour Montparnasse
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.
The Champ de Mars is a parade ground that became a lawn, and the Eiffel Tower stands at one end of it.
The Panthéon was built as a church and finished just in time to stop being one.
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.
Grande Mosquée de Paris
The Grand Mosque of Paris opened in 1926 as France's thanks to its Muslim soldiers, and it remains the city's central mosque a century later.
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.
Ruines de la Bastille
The Bastille is a square where a prison used to be, and the prison held seven people on the day it was stormed.
Palais du Luxembourg
The Luxembourg Palace is the French Senate, and it was built because a widowed queen was homesick for Florence.
Pyramide du Louvre
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…
Église de la Madeleine
La Madeleine is a Greek temple in the middle of Paris, and it took seventy-nine years and several changes of mind to finish.
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 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.
Musée de la Vie Romantique
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 Hôtel de Ville is Paris's city hall, seat of the mayor and the city council, on the square that carries its name.
The Chapelle expiatoire is a neoclassical funerary chapel built between 1815 and 1826 on the site of the former Madeleine cemetery, where the guillotined bodies of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were buried in unmarked graves covered with quicklime in…
Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel
The Arc de triomphe du Carrousel stands in the Cour Napoleon, between the Louvre's wings and I. M.
Palais de Chaillot
The Palais de Chaillot is the curved, colonnaded building on the hill of Trocadero facing the Eiffel Tower across the Seine, built for the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques on the site of the demolished 1878 Palais du…
Hôtel de Matignon
The Hotel Matignon is the official residence and working office of the French Prime Minister, on the Rue de Varenne in the 7th arrondissement, and it is not open to the public in any ordinary sense — this is a…
Ten to fourteen days supports four or five days in Paris plus one coherent regional direction, such as Lyon, Bordeaux, Strasbourg, or Marseille. Avoid routing every extension back through Paris, because even fast TGV journeys leave local connection time at each end.
France applies Schengen entry rules, but the required passport validity or visa still depends on nationality and route. France-Visas is the official place to verify the exact requirement before booking and again before entering from outside Schengen.
TGV trains join France's largest cities, while TER services handle regional links and many rural areas still favour a car. Long-distance reservations may be mandatory, and each city retains its own urban ticket system rather than accepting one national visitor card.
April to June and September to October suit the Paris-plus-region route described here. Alpine access, Mediterranean heat, Atlantic weather, and rural seasonal services differ enough that the selected second region should determine the final dates.
France uses the euro (EUR). Bank cards are common, yet a small euro reserve remains useful for markets or local machines; confirm any terminal conversion choice before accepting it because this page does not record changing fees.
For urgent help anywhere in France, call 112; medical emergencies also use 15 and police matters 17. The electrical standard is 230 V with Type C and E plugs. This dataset has no recorded national tap-water finding, so consult the municipality or lodging for the specific stop.
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