Paris
Museums booked to the minute, and the quarters you walk to from them
- When to go
- October 14° · 13 rainy days
- Per day
- ~85 · 190 · 365 €budget · mid · comfort, per person · checked 7 Sep 2026
- How many days
- 3–5days
- For you
- 6 questions →
- Nearest airport
- 14 km Orly · 23 km Charles de Gaulle
- Right now
Paris needs three days for a first visit and four to five if you go inside the big museums, because each day is built around one timed entry — the Louvre, the Orsay, the Eiffel Tower or Notre-Dame. The rest of the day belongs to the quarter you can walk to from there.
Two big things in one day means two queues with the metro in between. With over nine million visitors a year the Louvre is the most visited museum in the world, and it takes half a day even if you see a single wing; add the Eiffel Tower and you have two slots you can't miss and no time left for a quarter.
Pick the quarter by the entry: from the Louvre you walk to Le Marais, from the Orsay to Saint-Germain and the Latin Quarter, from the Eiffel Tower across the river to Trocadéro. Montmartre is the only one that needs the metro, so it works best at the start of the day, before the booked entry.
The Mona Lisa is 77 × 53 centimetres, behind glass, and four in five visitors push through to see it, which makes its room the most crowded in the building. With half a day at the Louvre, a wing you care about gives you more than the wait in that room.
Guides for Paris
Shorter, practical pages for one concrete question each — how many days, how much money, where to sleep, where to escape the city.
Paris in 3 days
→The Louvre, the Orsay and the Eiffel Tower in three days that never cross back to the same bank twice — with Notre-Dame…
Day trips from Paris
→Seven day trips from Paris by train — from Versailles on a €2.55 regional ticket to Reims in 45 minutes by TGV, with…
Where to stay in Paris
→Six Paris quarters to sleep in, with the price for two in season and the drawback the listing leaves out — plus a city…
What Paris costs
→What Paris really costs per day in 2026 — from €46–72 with a hostel and a bakery to about €302 with a four-star hotel…
Paris past the postcards: the Arc on Wednesdays, free views
→Ten things Paris doesn't put on postcards — the Arc de Triomphe for €16 on Wednesdays, three free viewpoints…
What to see in Paris
The Louvre
A ticket is €32 for visitors from outside the EEA and €22 from within it, with a time slot. The pyramid has the longest queue; the Carrousel du Louvre and Porte des Lions entrances get you into the same museum.
The Eiffel Tower
Lift tickets go on sale 60 days ahead, and in summer the summit slots sell out first. If you're not going up, you see the whole tower from Trocadéro, across the river.
Musée d'Orsay
A railway station from 1900, a museum since 1986, holding the world's largest collection of Impressionists — Manet, Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh, Degas. Smaller than the Louvre, so half a day covers all of it.
Notre-Dame
Reopened in December 2024, five years after the fire. Entry is free; a free time slot, released online two to three days ahead, shortens the queue.
Le Marais
A quarter Haussmann's 19th-century rebuilding largely passed by, leaving medieval streets and more than a hundred 17th-century mansions. At its eastern edge is the Place des Vosges of 1612, the oldest planned square in the city.
- M
Montmartre
A separate hilltop village until 1860, now the 18th arrondissement. Sacré-Cœur at the top is free, and from the steps in front of it you look down over the city.
Stories from Paris
How it actually was when we were there, and what was worth it.
The Paris Museum Pass in 2026, and the maths that changed
→For a traveller who lives outside the EEA the same museum pass now behaves differently than for a visitor from Vienna. The break-even point moved, and it is easy to count.
Three things you probably did not know
Seventy-two names of French scientists and engineers are carved around the Eiffel Tower, just below the first platform. Eiffel had them cut in 1889; not one is a woman, though Sophie Germain worked on exactly the metal elasticity that holds the tower up.
The first paying public screening was held on 28 December 1895 in the basement of a cafe on the Boulevard des Capucines, where the Lumiere brothers charged for admission. Thirty-three people came.
A bronze plaque with an eight-pointed star is set into the pavement in front of Notre-Dame. It is the kilometre zero of France: every distance to Paris on every road sign in the country is measured from that spot.
Ready for Paris?
Within reach from here
Places sorted by straight-line distance from Paris — day trips or weekends.
France
→From Paris the TGV reaches Lyon, Bordeaux and Strasbourg in about two hours — France is chosen by direction, not by city
Italy
→The cities on the high-speed line are an hour or two apart; the coast, Matera and the Tuscan hills lie off it
Spain
→A country where dinner is at ten and the city wakes up as everywhere else turns the lights off
All 277 places we write about sit on one page — narrow them down by continent, country, price or what you are travelling for.
Within reach from here: Étretat, Brighton and Mont Saint-Michel
See how much of that actually suits you — or pin Paris if you have been.
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