Home > Rick on TV > Guide to Shows > Highlights of Paris

Highlights of Paris: Travel Details

This is a quick and handy source for details on the sights, hotels, tour guides and restaurants featured in the "Highlights of Paris" show. For much more (and updates), see this year's edition of Rick Steves' Paris guidebook.

Eiffel Tower
It's crowded and expensive, but this 1,000-foot-tall ornament is worth the trouble. In hot weather, it's six inches taller. It covers 2.5 acres and requires 50 tons of paint. Its 7,000 tons of metal are spread out so well at the base that it's no heavier per square inch than a linebacker on tiptoes. Visitors to Paris may find Mona Lisa to be less than expected, but the Eiffel Tower rarely disappoints, even in an era of skyscrapers.

Built a hundred years after the French Revolution (and in the midst of an Industrial one), the tower served no function but to impress. Bridge-builder Gustave Eiffel won the contest for the 1889 Centennial World's Fair by beating out such rival proposals as a giant guillotine. To a generation hooked on technology, the tower was the marvel of the age, a symbol of progress, and of man's ingenuity. To others it was a cloned-sheep monstrosity. The writer Guy de Maupassant routinely ate lunch in the tower just so he wouldn't have to look at it.

Delicate and graceful when seen from afar, the Eiffel is massive — even a bit scary — from close up. You don't appreciate the size until you walk toward it; like a mountain, it seems so close but takes forever to reach.

A tourist information office/ticket booth is between the Pilier Nord (north pillar) and Pilier Est (east pillar). The stairs (yes, you can walk up partway) are next to the Jules Verne restaurant entrance (allow $300 per person for the restaurant, reserve 3 months in advance). A sign in the cheek-to-jowl elevator tells you to beware of pickpockets.

The first level has exhibits, a post office (daily 10:00–19:00, cancellation stamp will read Eiffel Tower), a snack bar, WCs and souvenirs. Read the informative signs (in English) describing the major monuments, see the entertaining free movie on the history of the tower, and don't miss a century of fireworks — including the entire millennium blast — on video. Then consider a drink or a sandwich overlooking all of Paris at the snack café (outdoor tables in summer) or at the city's best view bar/restaurant, Altitude 95. The second level has the best views (walk up stairway to get above netting), a cafeteria, and WCs.

While you'll save no money, consider taking the lift up and the stairs down (from second level) for good exercise and views.

It costs €4 to go to the first level, €7.50 to the second and €11 to go all the way. On a budget? You can climb the stairs to the second level for only €3.50 (daily March–Sept 9:00–24:00, Oct–Feb 9:30–23:00, last entry 1 hr before closing, shorter lines at night, can catch Bateaux-Parisiens boat for Seine cruise at base of tower, Mo: Trocadéro, RER: Champ de Mars-Tour Eiffel, tel. 01 44 11 23 23, www.tour-eiffel.fr).


Paris Plage and roller-bladers
The year 2005 will be the fourth consecutive summer that Paris officials remove cars from a key section of busy Right Bank express lanes to make room for an artificial beach (mid-July-mid-Aug). Tons of sand are poured over black asphalt, then sprinkled lightly with beach chairs and changing rooms, and voilá! — a summer scene that the Beach Boys would appreciate (though you can't swim in the river). The faux-beach extends two miles along the Seine on voie Georges Pompidou (just north of the Ile de la Cité), from pont des Arts to pont de Sully, with three main sub-areas: one sandy, one grassy, and one with wood decking. You'll also find climbing walls, a swimming pool, trampolines, a library, beach volleyball, badminton, and Frisbee areas.


The same riverside highway also provides a long fun-filled traffic-free zone for joggers, bicyclists, and rollerbladers (mid-July-mid-Aug Sun-Fri 9:00-16:00). For even more high-rolling fun, thousands of rollerbladers take to the streets Fridays at 22:30 and summer Sunday afternoons as police close off various routes in different parts of downtown (ask at your hotel or a TI).


Arnaud Servignat, tour guide
For many, Paris merits hiring a Parisian as your personal guide. Arnaud Servignat, who runs Global Travel Partners, is an excellent licensed local guide (€215/half-day, €335/full day; also does car tours of the countryside around Paris for €300/half-day, €505/full day; tel. 06 68 80 29 05, fax 01 42 57 00 38, arnaud.servignat@noos.fr).

Orsay Museum
The Orsay Museum boasts Europe's greatest collection of Impressionist works. It might be less important than the Louvre — but it's more purely enjoyable.

This wonderful museum, housed in an atmospheric old train station, picks up where the Louvre leaves off: the second half of the 19th century. This is art from the tumultuous times that began when revolutions swept across Europe in 1848, and ended with the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

Begin on the ground floor, featuring conservative art of the mid-1800s — careful, idealized neoclassicism (with a few rebels mixed in). Then glide up the escalator to the late 1800s, when the likes of Manet, Monet, Degas and Renoir jolted the art world with their colorful, lively new invention, Impressionism. (Somewhere in there, Whistler's Mother sits quietly.)

You'll also enjoy the works of their artistic descendents, the post-Impressionists (van Gogh and Cézanne) and the Primitives (Rousseau, Gauguin, Seurat and Toulouse-Lautrec). On the mezzanine level, waltz through the Grand Ballroom, Art Nouveau exhibits and Rodin sculptures.

The museum costs €7 (€5 after 16:15 and on Sun, free on first Sun of month). English-language tours usually run at 11:30 daily except Sun, cost €6, take 90 min, and are also available on audioguide (€5). Tours in English focusing on the Impressionists are offered Tue at 14:30 (€6, sometimes also on other days).


Catacombs of Paris
These underground tunnels contain the anonymous bones of six million permanent Parisians. In 1785, the Revolutionary Government of Paris decided to relieve congestion and improve sanitary conditions by emptying the city cemeteries (which traditionally surrounded churches) into an official ossuary.

The perfect locale was the many miles of underground tunnels from limestone quarries, which were, at that time, just outside the city. For decades, priests led ceremonial processions of black-veiled, bone-laden carts into the quarries, where the bones were stacked into piles five feet high and as much as 80 feet deep behind neat walls of skull-studded tibiae. Each transfer was completed with the placement of a plaque indicating the church and district from which that stack of bones came and the date they arrived.

From the entry, a spiral staircase leads 60 feet down. Then you begin a one-mile subterranean walk. After several blocks of empty passageways, you ignore a sign announcing: "Halt, this is the empire of the dead." Along the way, plaques encourage visitors to reflect upon their destiny: "Happy is he who is forever faced with the hour of his death and prepares himself for the end every day."

You emerge far from where you entered, with white limestone-covered toes, telling anyone in the know you've been underground gawking at bones. Note to wannabe Hamlets: An attendant checks your bag at the exit for stolen souvenirs. A flashlight is handy. Being under 6'2" is helpful.

The catacombs cost €5 (Tue–Sun 10:00–17:00, ticket booth closes at 16:00, closed Mon, 1 place Denfert-Rochereau, tel. 01 43 22 47 63). Take the Métro to Denfert-Rochereau, then find the lion in the big traffic circle; if he looked left rather than right, he'd stare right at the green entrance to the Catacombs.


Carnavalet Museum
At the Carnavalet Museum, French history unfolds in a series of stills — like a Ken Burns documentary, except you have to walk. The Revolution is the highlight, but you get a good overview of everything, from Louis XIV–period rooms, to Napoleon, to the belle époque.

The tumultuous history of Paris is well portrayed in this converted Marais mansion. Explanations are in French only, but many displays are fairly self-explanatory. You'll see paintings of Parisian scenes, French Revolution paraphernalia, old Parisian store signs, a small guillotine, a model of 16th-century Ile de la Cité (notice the bridge houses) and rooms full of 17th-century Parisian furniture.

The museum is free (Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00, closed Mon). Avoid lunchtime (12:00-14:00), when many rooms close (23 rue de Sévigné, Mo: St. Paul, tel. 01 44 59 58 58).


Champs-Elysées
Don't leave Paris without strolling the avenue des Champs-Elysées. This is Paris at its most Parisian: monumental sidewalks, stylish shops, grand cafés and glimmering showrooms.

This famous boulevard is Paris' backbone, with its greatest concentration of traffic. From the Arc de Triomphe down the avenue des Champs-Elysées, all of France seems to converge on place de la Concorde, the city's largest square. While the Champs-Elysées has become a bit globalized, a walk here is a must.

To reach the top of the Champs-Elysées, take the Métro to the Arc de Triomphe (Mo: Charles de Gaulle-Etoile) then saunter down the grand boulevard (Métro stops every few blocks: Charles de Gaulle-Etoile, George V, Franklin D. Roosevelt).

Jacquemart-André Museum
This thoroughly enjoyable museum showcases the lavish home of a wealthy, art-loving, 19th-century Parisian couple. After wandering the grand boulevards, you now get inside for an intimate look at the lifestyles of the Parisian rich and fabulous. Edouard André and his wife Nélie Jacquemart — who had no children — spent their lives and fortunes designing, building and then decorating a sumptuous mansion.

What makes this visit so rewarding is the fine audioguide tour (in English, free with admission). The place is strewn with paintings by Rembrandt, Botticelli, Uccello, Mantegna, Bellini, Boucher and Fragonard — enough to make a painting gallery famous. Plan on spending an hour with the audioguide.

The museum costs €8.50 (daily 10:00–18:00, elegant café, boulevard Haussmann, Mo: Miromesnil or St Philippe de Roule, tel. 01 45 62 11 59, www.musee-jacquemart-andre.com/jandre).

Back to the "Highlights of Paris" show

Excerpted from Rick Steves' Paris 2005