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.
185 places match
Category
Typical visit duration
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.
Château de Vincennes is a medieval fortress on the eastern edge of Paris, beside the Bois de Vincennes.
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.
Bois de Boulogne
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.
Le Bataclan
The Bataclan is a concert hall of 1,694 seats at 50 Boulevard Voltaire, and it is the site of one of the worst attacks in modern French history.
At roughly 995 hectares, the Bois de Vincennes is the largest public park inside Paris, wrapping the eastern edge of the 12th arrondissement.
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 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.
Shakespeare and Company is an independent English-language bookshop at 37 rue de la Bûcherie on the Left Bank, facing Notre-Dame across the Seine.
Marché couvert des Enfants Rouges
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…
The Hôtel de Ville is Paris's city hall, seat of the mayor and the city council, on the square that carries its name.
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
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.
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 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 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…
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 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…
The Musee Marmottan Monet occupies a former hunting lodge built for the Duke of Valmy on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, bought in the late nineteenth century by the businessman Jules Marmottan and later expanded by his son…
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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