Landmarks in Paris

Eiffel Tower

1889 · Stéphen Sauvestre

A tapering openwork iron lattice standing on four splayed arched legs, its ironwork left in a uniform brownish paint rather than clad in stone, with an observation platform near the summit of its slender profile.

Built between 1887 and 1889 by the company of engineer Gustave Eiffel as the centrepiece of that year's World's Fair and to mark the centenary of the Revolution, the tower is a lattice structure of wrought iron nicknamed the Iron Lady for its material. Leading artists and intellectuals criticised the design when it went up. It held the title of tallest human-made structure for forty-one years, until the Chrysler Building was finished in 1930. It was granted monument historique status only in 1964, and was named part of a Seine-banks UNESCO listing in 1991.

• It was criticised on completion by some of France's leading artists and intellectuals, who saw it as disfiguring the city.
• It held the record for tallest human-made structure for forty-one years, until New York's Chrysler Building was finished in 1930.
• It only received official historic-monument protection in 1964, seventy-five years after it opened.

Photo: Benh LIEU SONG (Public domain)

Notre-Dame de Paris

1163–1260

A Gothic cathedral with twin square west towers, a facade of three portals beneath a rose window, and a chevet ringed by flying buttresses supporting tall clerestory windows filled with patterned stained glass.

Begun in 1163 under Bishop Maurice de Sully on the Île de la Cité, the cathedral of the Paris archdiocese was largely finished by 1260, though successive master masons — among them Jean de Chelles, Pierre de Montreuil, Pierre de Chelles, Jean Ravy and Raymond du Temple — continued modifying and extending it into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Its rib vaults, flying buttresses and rose windows were structurally and decoratively pioneering. Damaged during the Revolution in the 1790s, it later hosted Napoleon's coronation and presidential funerals, and inspired Victor Hugo's 1831 novel.

• Its rib vaults and flying buttresses were pioneering structural techniques when first used.
• It hosted the coronation of Napoleon and the funerals of several French Republic presidents.
• Victor Hugo's 1831 novel set inside it renewed public interest in the building.

Photo: P e z i (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Arc de Triomphe

1836 · Jean-François Chalgrin

A single massive stone arch at the hub of twelve radiating avenues meeting in a star-shaped junction, its piers carved with relief panels of heroically nude warriors and engraved with battle and general names.

Designed by Jean-François Chalgrin in 1806 to honour those who fought in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the arch was completed only in 1836, after Chalgrin's death, under successors including Louis-Robert Goust, Jean-Nicolas Huyot and Guillaume Abel Blouet. It stands at the centre of the star-shaped Place Charles de Gaulle, anchoring the historical axis running from the Louvre to the Grande Arche de la Défense. Its sculptural programme depicts heroically nude warriors. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier from the First World War lies beneath its vault, marked by an eternal flame.

• Its design was inspired by the ancient Arch of Titus in Rome.
• It anchors a historical axis of monuments running all the way to the Grande Arche de la Défense.
• Its carved warriors are shown heroically nude, an unusual choice for a military monument.

Photo: Jiuguang Wang (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Sacré-Cœur

1875–1914 · Paul Abadie

A pale-domed basilica in a neo-Byzantine, Romanesque-influenced style, its bright white stone and rounded central dome crowning a hilltop two hundred metres above the surrounding city.

Proposed in 1870 by the former Bishop of Nantes, Félix Fournier, after France's defeat in the war that toppled Napoleon III, the basilica was intended as penance for the nation's perceived moral decline. Construction on Montmartre's hilltop, overlooking the site of the Commune's defeat, began after that uprising was crushed in 1871, and the building was not finished until 1914. Paul Abadie's neo-Byzantine-Romanesque design was chosen from seventy-seven submitted plans. From its dome, two hundred metres above the Seine, the basilica overlooks the whole city and is now its second most-visited site after the Eiffel Tower.

• Its prominent hilltop site, overlooking where the Paris Commune made its last stand, still makes it a contested symbol for parts of the political left.
• Paul Abadie's design was chosen from seventy-seven competing proposals.
• It is the second most-visited site in the city, after the Eiffel Tower.

Photo: Tonchino (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Panthéon

1758–1790 · Jacques-Germain Soufflot

A Greek-cross building topped by a tall stone dome and fronted by a portico of Corinthian columns copying a classical temple front, with a crypt of distinguished dead beneath its floor.

Commissioned by Louis XV as a church for Saint Genevieve, Paris's patron saint, the building was designed by Jacques-Germain Soufflot and constructed between 1758 and 1790; neither the king nor the architect lived to see it finished, and Jean-Baptiste Rondelet completed the work. Weeks after completion, the Revolutionary National Constituent Assembly voted to convert it into a mausoleum for distinguished citizens, modelled on the Pantheon in Rome. It reverted to church use twice more in the 19th century before being fixed permanently as a mausoleum in 1881; Victor Hugo's burial there in 1885 confirmed the change.

• The building switched between church and mausoleum use twice in the 19th century before its secular role was made permanent.
• Its first interment was the revolutionary Mirabeau, whose remains were removed a few years later.
• Victor Hugo's burial there in 1885 is considered the moment its mausoleum status was confirmed.

Photo: Camille Gévaudan (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Louvre Palace

1546 · Pierre Lescot

A long limestone facade of tall arched windows, steep slate roofs and sculpted pavilions from the Renaissance through the 19th century, wrapped around internal courtyards on the Seine's right bank.

The site began around 1190 as a fortress defending Paris's western city wall under Philip II Augustus; that castle no longer stands above ground. Its replacement started in the late 1540s under Francis I, whose architect Pierre Lescot designed the palace's oldest surviving wing. Jacques Lemercier, Louis Le Vau and Hector-Martin Lefuel extended the palace in later centuries. It served intermittently as a royal residence until the 18th century, then opened as a public museum in 1793. In the late 20th century, I. M. Pei added a glass pyramid to its main courtyard.

• The site had been inhabited for thousands of years before the first fortress was built there around 1190.
• Its museum opened inside the palace in 1793, during the Revolution.
• The glass pyramid added to its courtyard in the late 20th century was designed by I. M. Pei, eight centuries after the first fortress.

Photo: Ali Sabbagh (CC0)

Palais Garnier

1875 · Charles Garnier

An opulently decorated Second Empire theatre front in an eclectic Beaux-Arts style, its facade dense with sculpture and ornament reflecting what critics called its extraordinary opulence when new.

Built for the Paris Opera between 1861 and 1875 at the behest of Napoleon III, the 1,979-seat theatre became known for its extraordinary opulence and the Napoleon III style of its design. It served as the primary home of the Paris Opera and its ballet company until a new opera house opened in 1989, after which it has been used mainly for ballet. Declared a monument historique in 1923, it is also known as the setting of a 1910 novel about a masked figure haunting its halls, later adapted into a long-running musical.

• It was the primary home of the Paris Opera and its ballet company until a new opera house opened in 1989.
• It wasn't declared a historic monument until 1923, decades after opening.
• A 1910 novel about a masked figure haunting its halls was later adapted into a long-running musical.

Photo: Peter Rivera (CC BY 2.0)

Pont Alexandre III

1900 · Joseph Cassien-Bernard

An Art Nouveau steel deck arch bridge whose ironwork is dense with ornament, standing out as the most extravagant of the crossings on its river even at a distance.

Completed in 1900, this steel deck arch bridge carries a roadway across the Seine, connecting the Champs-Élysées quarter with those of the Invalides and the Eiffel Tower. It was designed by Joseph Cassien-Bernard in the Art Nouveau style and is widely regarded as the most ornate and extravagant bridge in the city. It was classified a monument historique in 1975, and is separately recorded under a twentieth-century heritage category as well.

• It wasn't granted historic-monument protection until 1975, seventy-five years after it was completed.

Photo: Jebulon (CC0)

Catacombs of Paris

1787–1874

Narrow limestone tunnels lined floor to ceiling with stacked skulls and long bones arranged in geometric patterns, reached by a spiral stone staircase descending far below street level.

To empty Paris's overflowing central cemetery after 1774 wall collapses near the Holy Innocents' burial ground, the ossuary was carved into former limestone quarries south of the old Barrière d'Enfer gate. From 1788, nightly covered wagons carried remains from most of the city's parish graveyards into consolidated mine passages; the transfer took roughly two years to complete. Left largely forgotten and used for private concerts in the early nineteenth century, the tunnels were renovated and opened to public visits in 1874, and have been managed since 2013 as one of the City of Paris Museums.

• Remains of Revolutionary-era victims, including Charlotte Corday and a group of Girondins, were among those transferred into the tunnels.
• The tunnels served as a novelty venue for concerts and private parties for decades before they were ever opened to public visitors.
• Although only a small section of the wider quarry network, the whole system of Parisian tunnels below the surface is often called by the ossuary's name.

Photo: Campola (CC BY 3.0)

Champs-Élysées

1667 · André Le Nôtre

A wide, ruler-straight avenue of matched building facades and rows of trees rising gently toward a monumental arch, lined at its lower end by chestnut groves and at its upper end by shops, cinemas and cafés.

Laid out in 1667 by André Le Nôtre as a formal extension of the Tuileries Garden for Louis XIV, the avenue took its present name in 1709 and was extended twice more, in 1710 and 1774, reaching its current length. It became city property in 1828, gaining footpaths, fountains and gas lighting. Later rebuilt with Second Empire garden cafés, theatres and a giant exhibition hall for the 1855 and 1900 world's fairs, it is now lined with shops and cinemas, and hosts the Tour de France's finish and the Bastille Day military parade.

• Its name refers to the Elysian Fields, the resting place of dead heroes in Greek mythology.
• Occupying Russian, British and Prussian troops camped in its gardens after Napoleon's fall and burned its trees for firewood.
• It has staged victory parades for opposing sides twice over: German troops marched it in 1871 and 1940, before Allied forces did the same in 1944.

Photo: Jebulon (CC0)

Conciergerie

1285–1314

A row of round, conical-roofed medieval towers along the riverbank, fronting two surviving vaulted stone halls lined with columns, one still holding a fragment of a great marble ceremonial table.

Part of the Capetian royal palace on an island in the Seine, its great hall and towered river facade were built under Philip II before being rebuilt and expanded by Philip IV between 1285 and 1314, when the Grand Chamber became the seat of parliament. After Charles V moved the royal household to the Louvre in the 1360s, the building's custodian, or concierge, gained authority over its prisons, and it took on its present name. During the French Revolution, 2,781 prisoners, including Marie Antoinette, were tried in its halls before being sent elsewhere in the city for execution.

• Wealthier prisoners could pay for furnished cells known as pistoles, while the poorest were held in vermin-infested cells called oubliettes.
• A single slab of a marble table once used for royal ceremonies still survives, mounted on the wall of one of its medieval halls.
• During the September Massacres of 1792, a mob released more than a hundred prisoners while killing 378 others inside its walls.

Photo: Marek Mróz (CC BY 4.0)

La Madeleine

1763–1842 · Pierre-Alexandre Vignon

A rectangular building ringed on all four sides by fifty-two towering Corinthian columns, giving it the silhouette of an ancient temple rather than a church, with no dome or spire visible from outside.

Planned under Louis XV to close a vista along the newly laid Rue Royale, construction began in 1763 to a design later abandoned for a simpler classical one. Halted by the Revolution in 1789 with only the foundations and portico built, the project was redirected in 1806, when Napoleon commissioned Pierre-Alexandre Vignon's temple-form design with columns on all four sides; Vignon died before completion, and Jacques-Marie Huvé finished the building. Reconsecrated as a parish church, it was finally inaugurated in 1842 and later hosted the funerals of Chopin, Joséphine Baker and Coco Chanel.

• At Chopin's 1849 funeral, the female singers his requiem required were only permitted to perform hidden behind a black velvet curtain.
• An 1837 proposal to convert the unfinished building into Paris's first railway station was rejected as too costly.
• Its fifty-two exterior columns each stand twenty metres tall.

Photo: Jebulon (CC0)

Les Invalides

1671–1706 · Jules Hardouin-Mansart

A gilded dome rising above a long, symmetrical stone complex arranged around a broad parade-ground courtyard, its golden surface visible above the surrounding rooftops from a considerable distance.

Ordered by Louis XIV in 1670 as a hospital and retirement home for disabled veterans, the complex was designed by Libéral Bruant and largely finished by 1676, with fifteen courtyards including a parade ground. Jules Hardouin-Mansart added an adjoining domed royal chapel, completed in 1706 with a ceiling painted by Charles de La Fosse. Stormed for its weapons stores on the morning the Bastille fell, the complex still houses around a hundred veterans alongside the Musée de l'Armée, and its dome now holds the tomb of Napoleon.

• Rioters seized cannon and muskets from its cellars on the morning of 14 July 1789, hours before storming the Bastille with them.
• Its dome conceals two stacked domes, with the outer one's windows hidden so visitors below appear to be looking straight at open sky.
• The lawn in front of the complex hosted archery and marathon events during the 2024 Summer Olympics.

Photo: DXR (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Élysée Palace

1718–1722 · Armand-Claude Mollet

A walled Neoclassical mansion set back behind a gated entrance courtyard, its garden front largely hidden from the street it faces, unlike grander freestanding palaces nearby.

Financed by the dowry of his wife, one of France's wealthiest heiresses, the mansion was built between 1718 and 1722 by Armand-Claude Mollet for the Count of Évreux. It passed through owners including Madame de Pompadour and the banker Nicolas Beaujon before Napoleon acquired it in 1808 and signed his abdication there in 1815. A law passed on 12 December 1848 made it the official residence of the French president, a role it has held ever since, alongside the president's weekly cabinet meetings. Nineteenth-century renovations, including work attributed to Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine, altered its interiors.

• An escaped chimpanzee broke into the grounds in 1917 and reportedly tried to drag a president's wife up a tree.
• Napoleon III kept a secret underground passage, since demolished, linking it to the Tuileries Palace for private visits.
• Its construction was financed largely by a dowry built on a fortune from the transatlantic slave trade.

Photo: Tangopaso (Public domain)

Musée d'Orsay

1898–1986 · Victor Laloux

A vast glazed barrel-vaulted hall built into a former train shed, a monumental railway clock still mounted above galleries arranged along what were once the platforms.

A trio of architects, including Victor Laloux, designed the building as the Gare d'Orsay railway station, raised between 1898 and 1900 for the Paris–Orléans line. It faced demolition in 1970 before being saved and listed as a historic monument in 1978. A competition that year chose ACT Architecture to convert its train shed into gallery space, with interiors designed by Gae Aulenti; the museum opened in 1986. Its glazed barrel-vaulted hall now displays the world's largest collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings, drawing 3.2 million visitors in 2022 alone.

• The building narrowly avoided demolition for a hotel in 1970, before a preservation campaign got it listed as a historic monument in 1978.
• A 1:100 scale model of the Paris Opera district sits beneath glass flooring that visitors walk directly over.
• A donated collection of about 600 artworks in 2016 was the largest gift of foreign art to France since the Second World War.

Photo: Szilas (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Père Lachaise Cemetery

1804–1850 · Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart

A hillside cemetery of uneven, winding paths climbing among densely packed carved tombs and mausoleums beneath mature trees, with a domed Byzantine Revival building housing a columbarium among the graves.

Opened in 1804 on land bought by the city and established as a cemetery under Napoleon, the grounds were laid out by Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart in an English garden style of winding paths and mixed plantings. Burials were slow at first, since the site lay outside the city and had not been blessed by the Church. A staged 1817 transfer of the remains of La Fontaine and Molière made burial there fashionable, and the grounds were expanded five times by 1850. Its Byzantine Revival columbarium and crematorium, France's first, opened in 1894; over a million bodies lie within its 44 hectares.

• Administrators boosted the cemetery's popularity with a staged 1817 reburial of La Fontaine and Molière, followed by the medieval couple Abélard and Héloïse.
• It hosted France's first cremation in 1889, though the practice stayed rare there until the late twentieth century.
• A niche inscribed with Maria Callas's name in the columbarium is only a cenotaph; she was not actually interred there.

Photo: Pierre-Yves Beaudouin (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Place de la Concorde

1772 · Ange-Jacques Gabriel

A vast open octagon bordered by a shallow moat and stone balustrade, centred on a tall pink granite obelisk flanked by two monumental fountains and ringed by statues personifying French cities.

An equestrian statue of Louis XV once stood at the centre of this square, laid out from 1748 and finished in 1772 to a design by Ange-Jacques Gabriel; the statue was destroyed and melted down in 1792. Renamed Place de la Révolution, the square became the main site of the Terror's public executions, including those of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and, later, Robespierre himself, before taking its present name in 1795 as a gesture of reconciliation. An Egyptian obelisk, a gift from Egypt's ruler, was raised at its centre in 1836, flanked by two fountains added soon after.

• The obelisk at its centre was a gift from the Egyptian ruler Muhammad Ali, raised before a huge crowd in 1836.
• Of the roughly 2,500 people guillotined in Paris during the Revolution, about 1,119 were executed on this square alone.
• The square changed name five times between 1748 and 1830, following the fortunes of the monarchy it once celebrated.

Photo: Jebulon (CC0)

Pont Neuf

1578–1606 · Jean-Baptiste Androuet du Cerceau

Two angled stone arch spans, one of five arches and one of seven, meeting at a small triangular park at the island's tip, its piers carved with hundreds of individual grotesque stone masks and fitted with raised pedestrian pavements.

Henry III laid its first stone in 1578, but construction stalled for over a decade during the Wars of Religion before resuming under Henry IV; the bridge opened to traffic in 1604, was completed in 1606 and inaugurated in 1607. Built as two angled stone spans meeting the western tip of the Île de la Cité, it was the first Paris bridge without houses lining its roadway, fitted instead with pavements for pedestrians. Its piers carry 381 carved stone masks, and a bronze equestrian statue of Henry IV, destroyed in 1792, was rebuilt in 1818.

• It was the first Paris bridge built without houses lining it, so as not to block views of the Louvre.
• Its piers carry 381 individually carved stone masks, no two of them alike.
• A statue destroyed in the Revolution was later recast partly from the melted bronze of another toppled monument.

Photo: Ibex73 (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sainte-Chapelle

1238–1248 · Pierre de Montreuil

A tall, narrow Gothic chapel whose upper hall is almost entirely glazed, thin stone tracery supporting soaring walls of jewel-toned thirteenth-century stained glass.

Within the royal palace on the Île de la Cité, construction began after 1238 on a two-level chapel consecrated in 1248 to house relics of the Passion, chiefly the Crown of Thorns, bought by Louis IX from the Latin emperor at Constantinople for well over three times the chapel's own construction cost. Its upper level, reserved for the royal family, opens onto walls almost entirely of stained glass, among the most extensive surviving thirteenth-century collections anywhere. Damaged during the Revolution and restored in the nineteenth century, it is now run as a museum alongside the neighbouring Conciergerie.

• The relics it was built to house cost more than three times what the chapel itself did to construct.
• The Crown of Thorns relic was later kept at Notre-Dame Cathedral and survived that building's 2019 fire.
• Composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier was buried in the chapel's small cemetery in 1704; the cemetery no longer exists.

Photo: Uoaei1 (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Tuileries Garden

1564–1667 · André Le Nôtre

A long formal garden of straight gravel avenues and clipped hedge-bordered flowerbeds, with round or octagonal ornamental lakes and raised terraces running along its river and street sides.

Catherine de' Medici created this Italian Renaissance garden in 1564 for her new riverside palace, complete with fountains, a labyrinth and a grotto; the grounds were pillaged during the Wars of Religion before Henry IV restored them and planted mulberry trees there, hoping to cultivate silkworms and start a French silk industry. André Le Nôtre redesigned the garden from 1664 into a symmetrical formal layout of long straight avenues and ornamental lakes bordered by raised terraces, and it opened to the public in 1667. It became a public park after the Revolution, and hosted the Olympic cauldron in 2024.

• Henry IV planted a dedicated walk of mulberry trees there, hoping to cultivate silkworms and start a French silk industry.
• A royal carousel celebrating the birth of Louis XIV's first child gave one section of the garden its name.
• It hosted the Olympic and Paralympic cauldron during the 2024 Summer Games.

Photo: Moonik (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Place Vendôme

A square in the 1st arrondissement, north of the Tuileries Gardens, laid out by Jules Hardouin-Mansart with corners giving the rectangle an octagonal look. Its Vendôme Column, raised by Napoleon I to mark Austerlitz, was torn down by the Paris Commune in 1871 and re-erected.

Grand Palais

An exhibition hall and museum complex in the 8th arrondissement, begun in 1897 on the site of the demolished Palais de l'Industrie for the 1900 Universal Exposition. That same exposition also produced the neighboring Petit Palais and the Pont Alexandre III.

Palais Bourbon

The meeting place of the National Assembly, France's lower legislative chamber, on the Left Bank across from the Place de la Concorde. Built from 1722 for Louise Françoise de Bourbon and completed in 1728, it was confiscated and nationalized during the French Revolution.

Palais-Royal

A former royal palace on Rue Saint-Honoré, built for Cardinal Richelieu between about 1633 and 1639 by architect Jacques Lemercier. Later altered by successive Dukes of Orléans, it now houses the Ministry of Culture, the Conseil d'État and the Constitutional Council around its arcaded garden.

Hôtel Ritz Paris

A luxury hotel overlooking the Place Vendôme, founded in 1898 by Swiss hotelier César Ritz with French chef Auguste Escoffier, built behind an 18th-century townhouse façade. It was among Europe's first hotels to offer an en suite bathroom, electricity and a telephone in every room.

Musée Carnavalet

A museum of Paris's history occupying two adjoining mansions, the Hôtel Carnavalet and the Hôtel Le Peletier de Saint Fargeau. The Hôtel Carnavalet opened to the public in 1880 after the city bought it in 1866, with the annexed second mansion following in 1989.

Montmartre

A 130-meter hill in Paris's 18th arrondissement, giving its name to the district and topped by the white-domed Basilica of the Sacré-Cœur. Known for its artistic history and nightclub scene, it also holds the older Saint Pierre de Montmartre church, built in 1147.

Comédie-Française

A state theatre founded in 1680, the oldest active theatre company in the world, with its main venue, the Salle Richelieu, inside the Palais-Royal complex. Nicknamed "La Maison de Molière" after Molière, whose troupe it descended from, it became a state-controlled entity in 1995.

Tour Montparnasse

A 210-meter office skyscraper in the Montparnasse area, built between 1969 and 1973 and the tallest in France until 2011. It remains the tallest building in Paris proper, designed by architects Eugène Beaudouin, Urbain Cassan and Louis de Hoÿm de Marien.

Musée du Quai Branly

An art museum designed by Jean Nouvel, showing indigenous art and cultures of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas from a collection of more than a million objects. Opened in 2006, it is the newest of Paris's major museums, drawing 1.15 million visitors in 2016.

Louis Vuitton Foundation

An art museum and cultural center sponsored by LVMH, opened 20 October 2014 in a Deconstructivist building by architect Frank Gehry, with groundwork begun in 2006. It sits by the Jardin d'Acclimatation in the Bois de Boulogne and drew over 1.4 million visitors in 2017.

Louvre Pyramid

A glass-and-metal entranceway and skylight designed by I. M. Pei in the Louvre's main courtyard, ringed by three smaller pyramids of the same style. Completed in 1989 as part of the Grand Louvre project, it now serves as the museum's main entrance and symbol.

Shakespeare and Company

An English-language bookstore on Paris's Left Bank, opened in 1951 by American George Whitman as "Le Mistral" before being renamed in 1964. The new name honored Sylvia Beach's earlier bookstore of the same name, closed since 1941, on Shakespeare's 400th birthday.