Explorer Paris

Notre-Dame de Paris is a Gothic Catholic cathedral on the Île de la Cité, built between 1163 and 1345. A 2019 fire destroyed its roof and spire; the cathedral reopened in December 2024 after restoration. Visitors can see its flying buttresses, rose windows, sculpted portals and the Great Organ.

The Conciergerie is a former royal palace and prison on the Île de la Cité, built as part of the medieval Palais de la Cité alongside the Sainte-Chapelle. During the French Revolution it held prisoners awaiting trial, including Marie Antoinette, before their execution. Two large medieval halls survive, and the building is now a national monument.

The Sainte-Chapelle is a Gothic royal chapel built in the 13th century within the former Palais de la Cité, on the Île de la Cité. It was commissioned by King Louis IX to house relics of the Passion and is known for stained-glass windows that rise nearly 15 metres. The chapel now stands within the Paris Palais de Justice complex.

Musée Cognacq-Jay is an 18th-century decorative arts museum in the Hôtel Donon, a Renaissance mansion in the Marais. The roughly 1,200-item collection, formed between 1900 and 1925 by department-store founders Théodore-Ernest Cognacq and Marie-Louise Jaÿ, includes paintings by Fragonard, Chardin and Boucher alongside porcelain and jewellery.

A museum of the history of Paris, opened in 1880 in the 16th-century Hôtel Carnavalet and extended in 1989 into the neighbouring Hôtel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau. Its roughly 625,000 objects trace the city from prehistory through the Enlightenment and the Revolution to the 20th century, displayed across forty rooms after a 2021 renovation.

The oldest standing bridge across the Seine in Paris, built between 1578 and 1607 in two separate spans linking the Île de la Cité to both riverbanks. Despite its name, meaning 'New Bridge', it was the first bridge in the city built without houses lining its sides.

The Musée national Picasso-Paris occupies the Hôtel Salé, a 17th-century mansion in the Marais district, and holds the museum's collection devoted to Pablo Picasso. Its roughly 5,000 works span paintings, sculpture, drawings, ceramics and prints, alongside the artist's personal archive. Most pieces came from his estate after his death in 1973.

The Monnaie de Paris is the institution that produces France's coins, established in the 9th century and housed since the 1770s in a neoclassical building on Quai de Conti by architect Jacques-Denis Antoine. Coin production moved to Pessac in 1973, and the Paris building now holds a museum of numismatic collections.

A cabaret theatre in the Latin Quarter, on the site of a hall first built in 1803. The current building, completed in 1889, uses a metal structure designed by Gustave Eiffel, built at the same time as his tower. It reopened as a cabaret in 1977 and seats 720 for nightly dinner shows of revues and ballet.

Bourse de Commerce is a circular 18th-century building in central Paris, built in 1763-1767 as a grain exchange and topped by a dome rebuilt in copper and glass in the 19th century. Since 2021 it has housed the Pinault Collection of contemporary art, with galleries arranged around the domed rotunda under a 50-year lease from the city.

Maison de Victor Hugo is a writer's house museum on Place des Vosges, in the apartment where Victor Hugo lived from 1832 to 1848. Its rooms include a Chinese-style living room he decorated himself and a medieval-style dining room, leading to a reconstruction of the bedroom where he died in 1885.

The Musée des Arts et Métiers is a science and technology museum in the 3rd arrondissement, founded in 1794 and partly housed in the former priory of Saint-Martin-des-Champs. Its collection includes Foucault's pendulum, early aircraft by Louis Blériot and Clément Ader, and Blaise Pascal's calculating machine.

The Panthéon stands on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève in the Latin Quarter, built between 1758 and 1790 to a design by Jacques-Germain Soufflot. Commissioned by Louis XV as a church for Paris's patron saint, it was turned into a secular mausoleum during the Revolution. Its crypt holds the tombs of figures including Voltaire, Rousseau and Marie Curie.

The Louvre is a national art museum housed in the former Louvre Palace on the Right Bank of the Seine. Its collection spans antiquity to the mid-19th century and includes the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo. The glass pyramid entrance in the Cour Napoléon was added in 1989.

A contemporary art institution founded in 1984 by the Cartier luxury house. It moved in 2025 to a new building on Place du Palais-Royal, opposite the Louvre, designed by architect Jean Nouvel. The space shows changing exhibitions of contemporary art and holds a collection of over 1,500 works.

A former royal palace on Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris's 1st arrondissement, built for Cardinal Richelieu between 1633 and 1639 and later home to the Dukes of Orléans. The building now houses the Ministry of Culture, the Conseil d'État and the Constitutional Council; its arcaded garden and courtyards are open to the public, the interior is not.

The Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes is a zoo within the Jardin des Plantes botanical garden, founded in 1794 with animals taken from the royal menagerie at Versailles. It is one of the oldest zoos in the world and keeps small and medium-sized mammals, birds and reptiles across historic enclosures and aviaries.

A 23-hectare public garden in Paris's 6th arrondissement, laid out from 1612 for Marie de' Medici around the Luxembourg Palace, now the seat of the French Senate. Lawns, tree-lined walks, an octagonal pond with model sailboats and the 1620 Medici Fountain fill the grounds.

An Art Deco cinema on the Grands Boulevards, opened in December 1932 by architects Auguste Bluysen and John Eberson in a style inspired by New York's Radio City Music Hall. Its facade and main hall, seating over 2,700, were listed as a historic monument in 1981. A guided tour, Rex Studios, leads visitors behind the screen and through the technical spaces.

The Grande Galerie de l'Évolution is a natural history gallery in the Jardin des Plantes, inside a glass-roofed hall built in 1889. A 1994 renovation turned it into a display on evolution and biodiversity, with around 9,500 taxidermied specimens arranged over several floors, including a herd of African savanna animals in the central nave.