Paris rewards a plan more than most cities, because its icons are capacity-controlled: the Eiffel Tower summit, the Louvre, Sainte-Chapelle and the Catacombs all sell timed tickets that vanish days ahead in season. Notre-Dame is open again after the fire — entry is free, but the free timed reservations go fast; book them the day before via the official app. The one rule that saves every Paris trip: reserve the big four before you leave home.
The equally important counter-rule: don't fill the calendar. Paris's best moments are unticketed — the covered passages of the 2nd arrondissement, Place des Vosges under the arcades, the Coulée Verte greenway, Luxembourg Gardens chairs, the food streets of the Marais. Alternate one booked icon with one wandering half-day and the city opens up. The museums nobody queues for — Carnavalet (free), the Petit Palais (free), Jacquemart-André — routinely beat the crowded ones for actual enjoyment.
When to visit: April–June and September–October are the classic windows — mild, long evenings, café terraces in use. July–August brings heat and the thickest crowds, though August also empties the city of Parisians, which has its own quiet charm. Note for 2026: the Centre Pompidou is closed for its multi-year renovation — its collection highlights are dispersed to other venues, so don't plan around the building itself.
Don't Miss
Highest-rated in Paris
Notre-Dame Cathedral
The Gothic cathedral at the heart of Paris, fully reopened in December 2024 after the devastating 2019 fire and a five-year restoration — free to enter, with the bell towers reopened in September 2025.
Sainte-Chapelle
A jewel-box Gothic chapel on Île de la Cité holding one of the finest surviving sets of 13th-century stained glass anywhere, built by Louis IX to house Christ's Crown of Thorns.
Jardin du Luxembourg
The Left Bank's grandest formal garden, surrounding the Luxembourg Palace (now the French Senate), with a central pond, a puppet theatre and shaded chestnut alleys popular with students and locals alike.
Bibliothèque nationale de France — Richelieu (Salle Ovale)
A magnificent oval reading room inside France's historic national library building, free to enter and browse — one of the most beautiful public interiors in Paris that most visitors never see.
Louvre Museum
The world's largest and most-visited museum — home to the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo and roughly 35,000 other works spread across a former royal palace so big that seeing it all in one visit is genuinely impossible.
Musée d'Orsay
The world's finest collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting, housed in a converted Belle Époque railway station on the Left Bank of the Seine.
All Things to Do in Paris
56 places, all reviewed and rated
Notre-Dame Cathedral
The Gothic cathedral at the heart of Paris, fully reopened in December 2024 after the devastating 2019 fire and a five-year restoration — free to enter, with the bell towers reopened in September 2025.
Sainte-Chapelle
A jewel-box Gothic chapel on Île de la Cité holding one of the finest surviving sets of 13th-century stained glass anywhere, built by Louis IX to house Christ's Crown of Thorns.
Jardin du Luxembourg
The Left Bank's grandest formal garden, surrounding the Luxembourg Palace (now the French Senate), with a central pond, a puppet theatre and shaded chestnut alleys popular with students and locals alike.
Bibliothèque nationale de France — Richelieu (Salle Ovale)
A magnificent oval reading room inside France's historic national library building, free to enter and browse — one of the most beautiful public interiors in Paris that most visitors never see.
Louvre Museum
The world's largest and most-visited museum — home to the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo and roughly 35,000 other works spread across a former royal palace so big that seeing it all in one visit is genuinely impossible.
Musée d'Orsay
The world's finest collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting, housed in a converted Belle Époque railway station on the Left Bank of the Seine.
Musée Rodin
Auguste Rodin's former home and studio, now a museum of his sculpture set around a 3-hectare garden where The Thinker sits in the open air.
Musée de l'Orangerie
A small, single-focus museum in the Tuileries Gardens built to house Claude Monet's eight enormous Water Lilies murals exactly as he wanted them displayed.
Musée Marmottan Monet
A former hunting lodge on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne holding the world's largest collection of Monet paintings, including the work that gave Impressionism its name.
Musée Jacquemart-André
A lavish 19th-century private mansion, still furnished as its art-collector owners left it, holding an outstanding collection of Italian Renaissance and French 18th-century art.
Eiffel Tower
Gustave Eiffel's 1889 iron tower — still the tallest structure in Paris and the single most recognisable landmark in the world — with three visitable levels and a summit view stretching up to 60 kilometres on a clear day.
Sacré-Cœur Basilica
The gleaming white Romano-Byzantine basilica crowning Montmartre's highest hill, free to enter, with a paid dome climb offering one of the widest views over Paris.
Palais Garnier
Charles Garnier's opulent 1875 opera house, its Grand Staircase and gilded foyer as much a reason to visit as an actual performance — plus a Chagall-painted auditorium ceiling.
Pont Alexandre III
Paris's most ornate bridge, dripping with Art Nouveau lamps, cherubs and gilded winged horses, connecting the Champs-Élysées area to the Invalides and Eiffel Tower.
Place des Vosges
Paris's oldest planned square, a perfectly symmetrical 17th-century plaza of red-brick pavilions in the Marais, and once home to Victor Hugo.
Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation
A stark, deliberately claustrophobic Brutalist memorial on the eastern tip of Île de la Cité, honouring the roughly 200,000 people deported from France to Nazi concentration camps.
Père Lachaise Cemetery
The world's most-visited cemetery — a hilly, tree-lined necropolis in eastern Paris where Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, Chopin, Édith Piaf and Molière all lie among elaborate 19th-century tombs.
Trocadéro Esplanade
The Palais de Chaillot's grand esplanade across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower — the single best free viewpoint for photographing the tower in full.
Palace of Versailles Day Trip
Louis XIV's vast royal palace and gardens, 20 kilometres southwest of Paris — the single most popular day trip from the city, built around the mirror-lined Hall of Mirrors and 800 hectares of formal gardens.
Giverny — Monet's House and Gardens Day Trip
Claude Monet's home and garden in Normandy, an hour from Paris, where the water-lily pond and Japanese bridge that inspired his most famous paintings still bloom exactly as he left them.
Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève
A 19th-century reading room opposite the Panthéon, its cast-iron structure and rows of green library lamps making it one of the most atmospheric library interiors in Europe.
Bibliothèque Mazarine
France's oldest public library, tucked inside the Institut de France on the Left Bank, with a wood-panelled reading room founded on Cardinal Mazarin's own 17th-century private collection.
Centre Pompidou
France's national modern art museum, instantly recognisable for its inside-out 'high-tech' architecture — closed for a five-year renovation until 2030, with the collection touring partner venues in the meantime.
Musée de Cluny — Musée national du Moyen Âge
France's national museum of the Middle Ages, built into a medieval abbey mansion on top of Roman-era baths — home to the celebrated Lady and the Unicorn tapestries.
Musée Carnavalet — Histoire de Paris
The free museum of Paris's own history, spread across two connected Marais mansions, tracing the city from prehistory through the Revolution to the present day.
Musée Picasso Paris
The world's largest public Picasso collection, spanning his entire career, housed in a 17th-century Marais mansion known as the Hôtel Salé.
Musée de l'Armée — Les Invalides & Napoleon's Tomb
France's national military history museum, sharing the vast Hôtel des Invalides complex with Napoleon Bonaparte's monumental tomb beneath its golden dome.
Musée des Arts et Métiers
France's oldest science and technology museum, set inside a former medieval priory, tracing three centuries of invention from early scientific instruments to Foucault's original pendulum.
Petit Palais
Paris's free fine arts museum, built for the 1900 World's Fair, holding a broad collection from antiquity through the 19th century inside an elegant Beaux-Arts palace with its own interior garden.
Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris
A museum inside Yves Saint Laurent's original haute couture studio, tracing his revolutionary fashion career — currently closed for renovation until autumn 2027.
Fondation Louis Vuitton
Frank Gehry's billowing glass-sailed building in the Bois de Boulogne, home to LVMH's contemporary and modern art foundation and major touring exhibitions.
Musée de la Musique — Philharmonie de Paris
A museum of more than 8,000 musical instruments and objects tracing 500 years of music history, set inside the Philharmonie de Paris concert hall complex in the Parc de la Villette.
Arc de Triomphe
Napoleon's monumental triumphal arch anchoring the Champs-Élysées, with an observation terrace atop 284 steps offering one of the best panoramic views in Paris.
Panthéon
A neoclassical domed monument on the Left Bank's highest point, built as a church and repurposed as France's secular mausoleum for its most celebrated citizens — Voltaire, Rousseau, Marie Curie and Victor Hugo among them.
Grand Palais
A vast Beaux-Arts glass-and-iron exhibition hall built for the 1900 World's Fair, reopened in 2025 after renovation and now hosting major art exhibitions, including works from the closed Centre Pompidou's collection.
Place de la Concorde
Paris's largest public square, home to a 3,300-year-old Egyptian obelisk and the site of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette's execution during the Revolution.
Jardin des Plantes & Ménagerie
Paris's oldest botanical garden and one of the world's oldest zoos, home to the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle's landmark Grande Galerie de l'Évolution.
Jardin des Tuileries
Paris's oldest public garden, running between the Louvre and Place de la Concorde, with Rodin and Giacometti sculptures scattered among its formal French landscaping.
Canal Saint-Martin
A tree-lined 19th-century canal through northeastern Paris, its iron footbridges and working locks giving the 10th arrondissement's cafés and boutiques a distinctly unhurried, local feel.
Promenade Plantée (Coulée Verte René-Dumont)
The world's first elevated park, built along a disused 19th-century railway viaduct in the 12th arrondissement, running 4.7 kilometres from Bastille toward the Bois de Vincennes.
Bois de Vincennes & Château de Vincennes
Paris's largest park, on the eastern edge of the city, home to a genuine medieval royal fortress with Europe's tallest surviving keep.
Passages Couverts (Galerie Vivienne & Passage des Panoramas)
Paris's surviving 19th-century covered shopping arcades, glass-roofed precursors to the modern shopping mall, best explored as a linked walk through the 2nd arrondissement.
Musée du Quai Branly — Jacques Chirac
A striking Jean Nouvel-designed museum of indigenous and non-Western art from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas, wrapped in a living wall of vegetation near the Eiffel Tower.
Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie
Europe's largest science museum, set in the Parc de la Villette, with a giant mirrored geodesic cinema dome, a submarine you can tour, and hands-on exhibits built for curious minds of every age.
Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris
The City of Paris's free modern art museum, occupying one wing of the Palais de Tokyo, with a strong Fauvist and Cubist collection anchored by Matisse's monumental La Danse.
Musée National Eugène-Delacroix
The Romantic painter's last home and studio, tucked into a quiet courtyard just off the Place Furstemberg in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
Catacombs of Paris
An underground ossuary holding the bones of roughly six million Parisians, stacked in deliberate patterns along 1.5 kilometres of former limestone quarry tunnels 20 metres below the street.
Montmartre & Place du Tertre
Paris's hilltop 'village,' with cobbled lanes, the last working vineyard in the city, and Place du Tertre's square of portrait artists just steps from Sacré-Cœur.
Seine River Cruise
A one-hour sightseeing cruise past Notre-Dame, the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower — the easiest way to see central Paris's riverside landmarks in one sitting, day or night.
Marché des Enfants Rouges
Paris's oldest covered market, established in 1615 in the Marais, where stalls serving Lebanese, Japanese, Italian and Moroccan food sit alongside fresh produce vendors under a slate roof.
Les Puces de Saint-Ouen
The world's largest antiques market, spread across seven hectares just north of Paris, with over 2,000 dealers spanning vintage furniture, art, jewellery and curiosities.
Palais de Tokyo
Europe's largest contemporary art centre, occupying a deliberately raw, unfinished-looking 1937 exhibition building with some of the longest opening hours of any museum in Paris.
Musée de l'Homme
France's museum of human evolution, biology and cultural anthropology, occupying one wing of the Palais de Chaillot directly across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower.
Conciergerie
A former medieval royal palace turned Revolutionary-era prison on Île de la Cité, best known as the last stop for Marie Antoinette and thousands of others before the guillotine.
Musée Grévin
Paris's Belle Époque wax museum on the Grands Boulevards, where visitors pose alongside more than 200 wax figures of celebrities, historical figures and French icons.
Champs-Élysées
The 1.9-kilometre avenue linking the Arc de Triomphe to Place de la Concorde — Paris's grandest shopping street and one of the world's most famous boulevards.
Free Entry in Paris
23 places with no admission charge
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