Explore Versailles

The Palace of Versailles is a former royal château in the Yvelines department, southwest of Paris. Built up from a hunting lodge under Louis XIV, it served as the principal residence of the French kings from 1682 until the French Revolution and houses the Hall of Mirrors. It now anchors an estate that also includes the gardens and the Trianon palaces.

The formal gardens of the Château de Versailles, covering about 800 hectares west of the palace and laid out from the 1660s by André Le Nôtre in the French formal style he perfected there. Parterres, statues, fountains and the Grand Canal are set within a surrounding belt of woodland, bordered by the towns of Versailles and Le Chesnay.

A Neoclassical château on the Versailles estate, built between 1762 and 1768 to a design by Ange-Jacques Gabriel for Louis XV's mistress, Madame de Pompadour, on the site of an earlier botanical garden. Louis XVI later gave it to his wife, Marie Antoinette, who used it as a private retreat away from the formality of the main palace.

A single-storey château in pink marble and stone at the northwestern edge of the Versailles estate, built from 1687 by Jules Hardouin-Mansart as a retreat for Louis XIV away from the strict etiquette of court. It replaced an earlier porcelain-tiled pavilion on the same site and stands beside its own park, which includes the Petit Trianon.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 Eiffel Tower is a 330-metre lattice iron tower on the Champ de Mars, built between 1887 and 1889 by Gustave Eiffel's company as the entrance arch for the 1889 World's Fair. Three levels are open to visitors, reached by lift or stairs, with restaurants on the first two floors and Eiffel's restored apartment on the top level.

The Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac is an anthropology museum near the Eiffel Tower, designed by architect Jean Nouvel and opened in 2006. Its collection covers the art and material culture of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas, displayed along a curving ramp and in a garden-side building. A planted wall covers part of its street-facing facade.

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 Palais de Tokyo is a building on Avenue du Président Wilson built for the 1937 International Exhibition. Its western wing has hosted a contemporary art centre since 2002, staging temporary exhibitions across large industrial-style galleries. The eastern wing houses the city's Museum of Modern Art.

Palais Galliera is an Italian Renaissance-style palace built between 1879 and 1894 by architect Léon Ginain, funded by the Duchess of Galliera. It is the City of Paris's fashion museum, holding about 70,000 garments and accessories from the 18th century to today, shown through rotating temporary exhibitions rather than a permanent display.

The Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris occupies the east wing of the Palais de Tokyo, built for the 1937 International Exhibition. Opened in 1961 and reopened in 2019 after renovation, it holds around 15,000 works of 20th- and 21st-century art, including paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Braque and Léger.

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.