Explore Paris

The Guimet Museum is a museum of Asian art on Place d'Iéna, founded by industrialist Émile Guimet, first opened in Lyon in 1879 and moved to Paris in 1889. Its collection covers Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, Tibet, India and Nepal, with sculpture, ceramics and Buddhist art from ancient to medieval periods.

The Aquarium de Paris is housed partly underground in the Jardins du Trocadéro, facing the Eiffel Tower across the Seine. It holds around 500 species in some forty tanks, including sharks, jellyfish and coral-reef fish. The aquarium also runs a cinema and screens films under the name Cineaqua.

The Arc de Triomphe stands at the centre of Place Charles de Gaulle, at the western end of the Champs-Élysées, commissioned to honour those who fought in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Victories and generals' names are engraved on its surfaces, and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier lies beneath its vault. Stairs lead to a terrace at the top.

The Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine is an architecture museum in the Palais de Chaillot. Founded in 1879 by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and reopened in its present form in 2007, it displays full-scale plaster casts of French monumental sculpture, including cathedral portals, alongside models of French buildings since 1850.

France's national maritime museum, established in 1827 and housed since 1937 in the Palais de Chaillot, overlooking the Seine. Its collection, dating back to a 1748 gift of ship models to Louis XV, covers naval history, model ships, weapons and maritime art. The museum reopened in 2023 after a renovation.

The Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie is a science museum in the Parc de la Villette in northeastern Paris, opened in 1986 in a converted former cattle-market building. Its permanent exhibits cover space, the human body, technology and the environment, and the complex includes a planetarium, a submarine and the nearby geodesic Géode cinema.

The Maison de Balzac is a writer's house museum at 47 Rue Raynouard in Passy, the only surviving residence of novelist Honoré de Balzac. He rented its ground-floor apartment from 1840 to 1847 under a false name while hiding from creditors, and wrote much of La Comédie humaine there. The city of Paris acquired the house in 1949.

The Paris Zoological Park, commonly called the Vincennes Zoo, is run by the National Museum of Natural History on 14.5 hectares of the Bois de Vincennes. It opened in 1934 and groups animals by biozone rather than species, with a tropical greenhouse. Its landmark is a 65-metre artificial rock visible across the park.

Musée Marmottan Monet is an art museum on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, in a former hunting lodge bought by Jules Marmottan in 1882 and bequeathed with his son Paul's collection to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1932. It opened in 1934 and holds over 300 Impressionist works, mainly Monet, after a 1966 donation by his son Michel.

Aquaboulevard is an indoor and outdoor water park in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, with swimming pools, water slides, a wave pool and a sand beach area under a glazed roof. The same site also has tennis and squash courts, a gym and shops.

The Château de Vincennes is a former royal residence and fortress on the eastern edge of Paris, largely built between 1361 and 1369. Its keep, a fortified 14th-century tower, held the private apartments of French kings, and its Flamboyant Gothic chapel was begun in 1379 and completed in 1552. Most of the complex is open to visitors.

The Louis Vuitton Foundation is an art museum and cultural centre funded by the LVMH group, in a glass-sailed building designed by Frank Gehry. It opened in 2014 next to the Jardin d'Acclimatation in the Bois de Boulogne. The museum shows modern and contemporary art exhibitions across several galleries.

The Jardin d'Acclimatation is a 19-hectare amusement park in the northern Bois de Boulogne, opened in 1860 by Napoleon III as a zoological and acclimatisation garden where plants and animals from French colonies were studied. It has operated as a family leisure park since the 1930s, with rides, gardens and a farm, and borders the Fondation Louis Vuitton.

A tennis complex in south-west Paris, built in 1928 and named after the World War I aviator Roland Garros, who made the first solo flight across the Mediterranean Sea. It hosts the French Open each May and June on clay courts, with twenty courts in total including Court Philippe Chatrier, Court Suzanne Lenglen and Court Simonne Mathieu.

The Basilica of Saint-Denis, a former abbey church north of Paris and a cathedral since 1966, has a choir completed in 1144 under Abbot Suger that marks the beginning of Gothic architecture. Its royal necropolis holds more than 70 tomb effigies and monuments of French kings and queens, from Dagobert to Louis XVIII, and its north tower and spire are being rebuilt.