The Paris travel guide

Paris is built around its monuments. The Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Notre-Dame and the Arc de Triomphe draw most first-time visitors, with Seine river cruises, cabaret shows and a Versailles day trip filling out a long weekend. From May through September the standby queues at the headline sights run 60 to 90 minutes, so timed-entry and skip-the-line tickets are the difference between a smooth day and an afternoon spent shuffling toward a turnstile. The Louvre is the largest of the city's draws and the most reliably oversold: weekday mornings are 30% quieter than weekend afternoons, and the Hall of Napoleon entrance off the Carrousel arcade clears faster than the main Pyramid.

The art and history collection runs deeper than the headlines suggest. The Musée d'Orsay holds the world's strongest Impressionist collection (Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne) inside a converted Beaux-Arts railway station. The Centre Pompidou covers 20th-century European modernism. The Musée Rodin and the Musée Picasso are smaller, walkable in 90 minutes each, and rarely sell out. The Catacombs, the Quai Branly indigenous-art museum and the Sainte-Chapelle stained-glass interior round out the second tier. Paris museum tickets bundle the major collections; the Paris Museum Pass works as a single combined entry for 50+ venues if you plan to cover four or more in two days.