Parisfive days on foot

The cathedral that just reopened, the stained glass of Sainte-Chapelle, the Louvre by timed ticket, Versailles for a day, and a morning in Montmartre.

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Getting around

France · 5 days

A city built around its river: islands in the middle, museums along both banks, and boulevards fanning out from the squares. Everything that matters fits into walking loops through the quarters.

Day by day

Day 1 · 7 placesLanding, Île de la Cité and the Latin Quarter
CDG → city: RER B train, 40 min
  • Aéroport Paris–Charles de Gaulle (CDG)
    Where most flights land. The RER B train runs into the city — forty minutes to Châtelet, cheaper and faster than a cab.
  • Conciergerie
    A royal palace turned revolutionary prison: Marie Antoinette waited for the guillotine here, and her cell has been rebuilt.
  • ★ Sainte-Chapelle
    A chapel with stained glass instead of walls: fifteen windows four stories high. In sunlight the whole room fills with colored light.
  • ★ Notre-Dame de Paris
    The cathedral reopened in December 2024 after the fire: inside everything is scrubbed back to pale stone, and nobody has seen it like this in two hundred years.
  • Shakespeare and Company
    The English bookstore across from the cathedral where Hemingway and the Beats slept upstairs. There is a library and a piano on the second floor, and you can sit and read.
  • Panthéon
    The tomb of France's great and Foucault's pendulum under the dome — the one that proved the Earth turns.
Day 2 · 6 placesThe Louvre, the gardens and the Marais
from the Louvre through the gardens to the Marais, all on foot
  • Rue Montorgueil
    A market street with no cars: cheese, oysters, the oldest pâtisserie in the city and tables out on the cobbles. This is where Parisians actually buy food.
  • Palais-Royal
    A quiet courtyard of striped Buren columns with a lime-tree garden behind it — two minutes from the Louvre and a tenth of the people.
  • ★ Musée du Louvre
    The largest museum on earth: the Winged Victory, the Venus de Milo and the Mona Lisa behind glass. Timed ticket, or you queue in the courtyard.
  • Jardin des Tuileries
    The garden between the Louvre and Place de la Concorde: gravel alleys, round ponds, and green chairs you can drag anywhere you like.
  • Galeries Lafayette
    A department store under a 1912 glass dome, with a free rooftop terrace looking at the Opéra and the Eiffel Tower.
  • Le Marais · Place des Vosges
    The oldest square in Paris under its arcades, and around it a quarter of mansions, galleries and falafel counters where the whole city walks in the evening.
Day 3 · 7 placesThe Eiffel Tower, the bridges and the Champs-Élysées
the Left Bank and both ends of the Champ de Mars
  • ★ Trocadéro
    The plaza facing the tower: this is where you see all of it at once, and it is the shot everyone comes for. At eight in the morning it is still empty.
  • Rue des Abbesses
    The street of the real Montmartre below the tourist square: bakeries, greengrocers, and a wall with "I love you" written on it in three hundred languages.
  • ★ Tour Eiffel
    A thousand feet, three levels, and an elevator ticket you buy a month ahead. Every hour after dark the tower sparkles for five minutes.
  • Champ de Mars
    The lawn under the tower where people sit with wine and a baguette. In the evening this is where you watch it light up.
  • Pont Alexandre III
    The most ornate bridge in the city: gilded horses, lamps, and a view of the Invalides dome one way and the Grand Palais the other.
  • ★ Arc de Triomphe
    The arch in the middle of a plaza with twelve avenues radiating out of it. It is 284 steps up, and from there the whole plan reads like a drawing.
Day 4 · 4 placesVersailles for the day
RER C to Versailles, 45 min each way
  • ★ Musée d'Orsay
    The Impressionists inside a railway station: Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh, and a clock face the size of a wall you can see the city through.
  • Place du Tertre
    The painters' square two minutes from the basilica: easels, twenty-minute portraits, and cafés where Picasso and Utrillo sat.
  • ★ Château de Versailles
    Louis XIV's palace and a Hall of Mirrors 240 feet long. Timed ticket, and even with one the line runs an hour.
  • Jardins de Versailles
    Le Nôtre's gardens: two thousand acres of clipped geometry, canals, and fifty fountains they run to music on weekends.
Day 5 · 2 placesMontmartre, then home
Montmartre in the morning, then CDG
  • Canal Saint-Martin
    A canal with iron footbridges where people sit right on the quay in the evening with a bottle and takeout.
  • Aéroport Paris–Charles de Gaulle (CDG)
    Departure airport for the flight home. Leave for the airport 2 hours before the flight, 3 for a long-haul one.
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