Attractions

Discover Paris — From the Eiffel Tower to Montmartre

Paris has topped Euromonitor's ranking of the world's most visited city destinations for five years running, and its best-known sights sit closer together than most first-time visitors expect. The Eiffel Tower anchors the Left Bank skyline, a short walk from the Musée d'Orsay's Impressionist collection. Across the river, the Louvre holds the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo behind I. M. Pei's glass pyramid entrance, while Notre-Dame, reopened in December 2024 after the 2019 fire, sits a few Metro stops away on the Île de la Cité.

North of the center, the hilltop district of Montmartre has kept its village feel, with the white domes of Sacré-Cœur looking out over the city and the painters of Place du Tertre still working in the open air. West along the Seine, the Champs-Élysées runs from the Arc de Triomphe down to Place de la Concorde, and a half-day trip out to the Palace of Versailles shows the scale Louis XIV built at.

Most of these sights are close enough to combine two or three into a single day on foot or by Metro, and several, including the Louvre on Tuesdays and the Eiffel Tower on summer weekends, are considerably calmer first thing in the morning or in the evening.