8 ideal things to do in Paris

The short list, pulled out of the long essay. No opening hours, because they change and I would only get them wrong — just what is worth your morning, roughly when to turn up, and where I have wasted time so you don’t have to.

By Ščenza

Last checked November 4, 2025

Notre-Dame de Paris, since the reopening
Île de la Cité, 4thFirst thing or the last hour; the tower climb needs booking separately
The cathedral came back on 7 December 2024 and the stone inside is the shock — scrubbed of eight centuries of candle soot, so pale that it looks wrong against every photograph you have ever seen of the place. The nave costs nothing, and the free timed slots only open a few hours ahead, which defeats planners and rewards people who decide things over breakfast. The towers reopened in September 2025. I stood in the ambulatory beside a Breton woman who had last been inside in 2018 and who cried quietly for about ninety seconds and then went to buy a candle.
The upper chapel at Sainte-Chapelle
Boulevard du Palais, Île de la CitéA bright morning; overcast days genuinely dim it
Eleven hundred and thirteen stained-glass panels, put up in seven years in the 1240s, as a reliquary the size of a building for Louis IX's Crown of Thorns. You enter at ground level into a low, dark, heavily painted undercroft that reads as a disappointment, then climb a corner stair and the whole thing detonates over your head. Do not go in cloud. I did, on a flat February Tuesday, and spent twenty minutes admiring what was effectively a very expensive dark blue wall.
Père Lachaise, walked without a list
20th, Boulevard de MénilmontantWeekday morning, ideally the day after rain
Ninety-seven divisions, forty-four hectares of cobbled avenue under chestnut trees, and roughly eighty thousand graves of which visitors reliably want four. Chopin is in division 11, usually with fresh flowers and at least one person playing a nocturne badly off a phone speaker. The better use of a morning is to give up on the map entirely, climb the eastern slope, and read the family vaults of people nobody has come for since 1911. Free maps are handed out at the Amandiers gate in season, a fact I discovered on my fourth visit.
Musée Carnavalet — Histoire de Paris
Rue de Sévigné, Marais, 3rdAny weekday; the permanent collection needs no booking
Two Marais mansions stitched together into a museum of the city itself, and the permanent collection is free, which in this arrondissement feels like an administrative mistake nobody has noticed yet. Proust's cork-lined bedroom is in here. So is Mucha's entire 1901 jewellery-shop interior, and the original painted sign for Le Chat Noir. It is where I send people who tell me they have already done Paris, largely because it demonstrates within about half an hour that they have not.
Marché des Enfants Rouges
Rue de Bretagne, 3rdLate morning, Tuesday to Sunday; shut on Mondays like half the city
Paris's oldest covered market, trading since 1615 and named for the orphanage whose children were dressed in red. It is now half greengrocer and half a huddle of tiny kitchens with shared tables, and at one o'clock the queues cross each other in a space originally laid out for handcarts. My own contribution to the congestion was standing in the wrong queue for eleven minutes, waiting for Moroccan food while reading a Japanese menu. The produce stalls at the Bretagne end are still doing the original job.
Walk the Coulée verte René-Dumont
12th, from behind the Opéra Bastille out towards VincennesMorning, or early evening in summer
Four and a half kilometres of disused railway viaduct planted with roses, bamboo and limes, opened in 1993 and quietly the original of the form — New York's High Line arrived two decades later and took the credit. For the first stretch you walk one storey up, level with the second-floor windows of the Avenue Daumesnil, close enough to read the spines on people's bookshelves and to feel mildly criminal about it. It flattens out into ordinary parkland and then into the Bois de Vincennes if you keep going.
Parc des Buttes-Chaumont
19thSunday afternoon, when the whole quarter is out on the grass
Haussmann's engineers took a worked-out gypsum quarry and blasted it into cliffs, hung a bridge across the gap, and put a small Roman temple on the pinnacle in imitation of the one at Tivoli. Nothing about the place is natural and all of it works. The slopes are steep enough that Parisians actually lie down on them, which they will not do in the Luxembourg. I misjudged the descent from the temple in leather-soled shoes once and reached the bottom considerably faster and less gracefully than planned.
Dinner at Bouillon Chartier, Grands Boulevards
Rue du Faubourg Montmartre, 9thEarly, or accept the queue; it opens every day of the year
Open since 1896 and a listed historic monument since 1989: a vast belle-époque hall with brass hat racks, mirrors, and waiters who take your order in pencil on the paper tablecloth and then add it up on the same tablecloth at the end. The cooking is unreconstructed working-class French — leeks vinaigrette, œuf mayonnaise, bœuf bourguignon — at the prices it was invented for. You will share a table with strangers. Mine, once, was a retired bus driver from Lyon who explained at length, and entirely unprompted, why Paris cannot make a quenelle.

The long version

Paris in the off-hour: the city that rewards stubborn patience

Everyone arrives in Paris with a list. I did too, in 2004, and I crossed almost none of it off. What I learned instead was that Paris doesn't perform for tourists in the afternoon. It performs at 7 a.m., at 11 p.m., and on Mondays when half the city is closed and the other half has finally exhaled.

Read the full essay →