Paris

Notre-Dame Reopened in December 2024 and It Is More Luminous Than It Has Been in Centuries

The five-year restoration stripped accumulated candle soot from the stone and from the medieval stained glass, so the colours read more clearly than they have in living memory. The rebuilt spire – faithful to Viollet-le-Duc’s nineteenth-century original – is back on the Paris skyline. Entry to the nave is free but requires booking timed slots at notredamedeparis.fr: slots release at midnight Paris time and popular weekend dates disappear within hours. The archaeological crypt in the forecourt, which reveals Roman and medieval layers beneath the square, is consistently undervisited relative to the cathedral above it, and is included with cathedral entry. Most visitors walk past the entrance without noticing it exists.

All major Paris sites require advance booking in 2026. The post-Olympics surge kept visitor numbers elevated well above pre-2024 levels, and the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, Sainte-Chapelle, and Versailles all operate timed entry. Plan the logistics before you arrive or plan to be turned away at ticket barriers on the day.

The Main Landmarks, Without the Usual Diplomatic Framing

The Eiffel Tower at night is substantially better than the Eiffel Tower during the day. Book at tour-eiffel.fr weeks ahead. The five-minute sparkling light show that runs on the hour from sunset to midnight is free and visible from the Champ de Mars lawn below. Watching it from the grass with a bottle of wine bought at the nearest supermarket is a more genuinely Parisian experience than any of the tower queues.

The Louvre contains 35,000 works. The Mona Lisa is small, behind thick glass, and at most hours surrounded by 200 people simultaneously taking photographs of each other taking photographs. That is simply the reality, and it is worth knowing before you go in. The Mesopotamian antiquities, the Dutch Golden Age rooms, and the French sculpture courts are extraordinary and frequently nearly empty. Use those rather than treating the Italian Renaissance wing as the only possible destination inside a museum that takes days to cover properly.

Sainte-Chapelle’s upper chapel is a gothic cage of 15 stained-glass windows containing 1,113 biblical scenes in deep cobalt and ruby. On a sunny late morning it is the single most astonishing interior in Paris – an opinion worth defending against anyone who argues for Versailles. Book ahead and go in good weather or it is a fraction of what it can be.

Beyond the Monuments

The Marais has become expensive and self-aware, but Place des Vosges – Paris’s oldest square, completed in 1612 – still has a quality of stillness that the more photographed corners of the city do not. Sunday is the one day most of the Marais stays open when the rest of central Paris is half-closed.

Montmartre before 9am is a genuinely different neighbourhood from Montmartre at noon. The vineyard behind Sacre-Coeur was planted in 1933 and actually produces wine, harvested every October in a local festival. Almost no tourists walking past it know it exists. The streets retain something of their pre-tourist character at that hour in a way they do not by midday when the portrait artists have settled in and the queues have formed.

Canal Saint-Martin between Belleville and the 10th arrondissement has iron footbridges, bookshops on the banks, and Parisians who live here rather than visiting. Le Comptoir General on Quai de Jemmapes is part bar, part vintage store, part greenhouse garden, and one of the more genuinely eccentric spaces in the city. Nobody is visiting it because a travel magazine told them to; they are there because someone who lives nearby told them about it.

The Latin Quarter rewards slow walking. The Musee de Cluny holds medieval treasures including the Lady and the Unicorn tapestry series, six panels from the late fifteenth century that are among the most valuable textile artworks in the world. Roman baths sit in the basement. Entry is EUR 12, queues are minimal, and the building is extraordinary on its own terms.

Eating

Le Bouillon Chartier has been serving classical French cooking since 1896. Pot-au-feu, blanquette de veau, profiteroles – a full meal runs EUR 20 to 25. No reservations; arrive before the 11:30 lunch opening or the 18:30 dinner opening. The bouillon format has been revived across Paris in recent years as a practical alternative to the mid-range bistro, and Chartier remains the original and the one worth going to.

The Marche des Enfants Rouges in the Marais has been a covered food market since 1615, making it the oldest in the city. It operates Tuesday through Sunday and the Saturday morning crowd is the most purely local thing in the neighbourhood.

Any boulangerie with a queue of Parisians at 7:30am is the correct one to go into. This is not a joke; the quality gap between the best and the decent is significant, and the best ones are identified by local habit rather than by guidebook placement. Ask whoever is serving at your hotel rather than consulting a ranked list.

Getting Around

The Navigo Easy card covers Metro, bus, tram, and RER. Top it up at any Metro station. Velib bicycle hire has become a practical option for cross-city travel since the cycling infrastructure expanded substantially after the 2024 Olympics; routes along the Seine and through the Marais are now separated from traffic and usable in comfort.

May, June, September, and October are the months Paris was designed for: long light, manageable crowds, restaurants at full operating strength. July and August see Parisians leave for the south and the restaurants worth visiting close for the month. Visiting in August is an experience, but it is not the Paris experience.

Tuesday through Thursday see the lowest tourist volumes at major sites. If you are making a specific trip to the Louvre or Versailles rather than fitting them around a longer stay, midweek is noticeably different from a weekend.