Paris in 3 days: the Seine, Montmartre and the Marais

Three days is the right measure for Paris: the first covers the Seine axis, the one everyone comes to see; the second climbs to Montmartre and comes back down into the Paris of the nineteenth century, the one of the boulevards, the Opéra and the Impressionists; the third walks through the two districts where Parisians actually live, the Marais and the Latin Quarter. By the end of the third day you will have seen the city as it really is, not just as it photographs. And if you want Versailles, we tell you exactly what you have to give up to fit it in too.

Day 1 — The Seine axis

7 km · 4 stops · 9am to 10pm · the day you see everything you have already seen in photographs

The first day is for clearing the must-sees, and doing it properly: they are almost all lined up along the river, from the island where Paris was born to the Tower. With three days available, today you do the Louvre from the inside, because there is time.

Morning – Sainte-Chapelle, Notre-Dame, the Île de la Cité

9am-1pm · Sainte-Chapelle about €13 · Notre-Dame free, with a time slot to book

Start at the Sainte-Chapelle as soon as it opens, not out of devotion but to skip the queue: it stands inside the Palais de Justice and has a real security check. It was built by Louis IX between 1242 and 1248 as a reliquary for the Crown of Thorns, and the upper chapel is a cage of glass: fifteen windows fifteen metres tall, over a thousand biblical scenes, two-thirds of the glass still that of the thirteenth century.

Then Notre-Dame, reopened on 8 December 2024 after the 2019 fire. Free entry but with a time slot to book on the website or the app: do it the evening before. The cleaned stone has a pale colour Parisians had never seen, and the three medieval rose windows survived the flames.

Finish the island from its western tip: the Pont Neuf, which despite its name is the oldest bridge in the city still standing, from 1607, and beneath it the square du Vert-Galant, a strip of land at water level where there is almost never anyone.

Afternoon – The Louvre, properly

2pm-5pm · Ticket about €22 online, with a time slot · Closed on Tuesdays

Three hours is the bare minimum and needs a plan. Ours: go in through the Carrousel du Louvre, on rue de Rivoli, almost always with a shorter queue than the entrance under the pyramid. Then do the Denon wing, which holds everything you will recognise: the Winged Victory of Samothrace at the top of the staircase — look at it from below, it was carved to be seen that way —, the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, David’s Napoleonic canvases.

On the Mona Lisa, the only useful advice: it is a small painting behind glass, with a permanent crowd in front and a one-way path. Thirty seconds is enough. In the same room, on the wall behind you, hangs the largest painting in the museum, Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana, and one person in a hundred looks at it.

If you have forty minutes to spare, go down to the basement level to see the foundations of the medieval fortress of Philippe Auguste: the Louvre was a castle before it was a palace, and a palace before it was a museum, and that round stone wall explains it better than any caption.

Evening – Concorde, Arc de Triomphe, Eiffel Tower

5pm-10pm · Arc de Triomphe about €16 · the timing is built around sunset

You leave the Louvre into the Jardin des Tuileries, laid out by Le Nôtre in 1664. Take one of the iron chairs, carry it to the edge of the pond and stop for twenty minutes: after three hours in a museum you need it, and it is something Parisians genuinely do.

At the far end is place de la Concorde, where the guillotine once stood that beheaded Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and at its centre the Luxor Obelisk, over three thousand years old, raised here in 1836. From here take line 1 to Étoile: the Champs-Élysées on foot is half an hour of shops just like the ones back home.

Go up the Arc de Triomphe: it is the best viewpoint in the city, because you see the twelve avenues radiating out and because the view includes the Eiffel Tower. If you arrive around 6:30pm you catch the daily rekindling of the flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which lasts ten minutes and almost no one knows about. You reach the Arch through the underpass: never cross the roundabout on foot.

Then metro line 6 to Trocadéro, half an hour before sunset, and the day ends on the lawn of the Champ-de-Mars waiting for the Tower to sparkle, which starts on the hour, every hour, and lasts five minutes.

Day 2 — Montmartre, the boulevards and the Impressionists

6 km · 4 stops · 9am to 10pm · you start at the highest point in the city and come down

Morning – Montmartre

9am-1pm · Basilica free, dome about €8 · Metro Anvers or Abbesses · Go early: from 11am it is a different place

Montmartre is a hill 130 metres high that until 1860 was its own town, outside Paris and outside the toll gates: which is why wine was cheaper here, and why people came to drink. From that came the cabarets, and from that came the fact that painters moved in, because they had no money.

Go up by the funicular (a metro ticket covers it) or up the steps, and reach the Sacré-Cœur. It is not old: it was begun in 1875 and consecrated in 1919, built as a national vow after the defeat by Prussia and the Commune. It is made of a particular stone, from Château-Landon, which on contact with water releases calcite and bleaches itself: which is why after a century and a half it is still white in a grey city. Inside is one of the largest mosaics in the world. From the forecourt you see all of Paris, and from the dome even better.

Then move away from place du Tertre, the square of the portrait painters, which no longer has anything genuine about it, and slip into the streets behind it: rue Saint-Rustique, rue de l’Abreuvoir, the Maison Rose, the Montmartre vineyard — eight hundred square metres of vines in the middle of the city, harvested every October with a festival — and the Bateau-Lavoir, the wooden shack where Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. They are five minutes from the crowds, and there is no one there.

On the steps below the Sacré-Cœur someone will stop you to tie a bracelet on your wrist «as a gift»: the moment it is on, they will demand payment for it. Do not hold out your arm, and keep walking.

Early afternoon – Opéra Garnier and the grand boulevards

2pm-4pm · Visit to the Opéra about €15 · Metro line 12 from Abbesses to Opéra, 10 minutes

You come down the hill into the Paris of Haussmann, the one of wide avenues and buildings all the same height, built between 1853 and 1870 by demolishing half of medieval Paris. The symbol of that era is the Palais Garnier, the opera house, finished in 1875.

It can be visited by day even without a performance, and it is one of the most underrated visits in Paris. The grand staircase is made of marble in seven different colours, and it was not there for climbing: it was there for being seen while you climbed. The ceiling of the auditorium was painted by Marc Chagall in 1964, a piece of the twentieth century inside a Second Empire building: when it was unveiled it caused a furious controversy. Under the theatre there really is a body of water — it was used to stabilise the foundations in marshy ground — and it is where The Phantom of the Opera comes from.

Next door are the two historic department stores, the Galeries Lafayette and Printemps. Go into the Galeries even if you buy nothing: the 1912 stained-glass dome over the atrium is worth the two minutes, and from the free rooftop terrace you see the Opéra from above with the Eiffel Tower behind it.

Late afternoon – Musée d’Orsay

4pm-6:30pm · Ticket about €16 · Closed on Mondays · Late opening on Thursdays

If the Louvre is the museum you endure, Orsay is the one you enjoy: it sits inside a 1900 railway station, decommissioned because the platforms were too short for modern trains and saved from demolition at the last moment in the 1970s. The nave has survived intact, with the great clock at the far end.

Inside is the largest Impressionist collection in the world, on the fifth floor: Monet, Renoir, Degas, Manet, Cézanne, and the Van Gogh room with the 1889 self-portrait and the Church at Auvers. You can see it in two and a half hours without rushing, which on the Louvre would be unthinkable.

The thing not to miss is not a painting: it is the clock face on the fifth floor, transparent glass through which you look out over Paris through the Roman numerals. There is always a small queue for the photo, and it is worth it.

Evening – Saint-Germain-des-Prés

From 7pm · Free · Walk 15 minutes along the river

From Orsay walk east along the left bank into Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The church that gives the district its name is the oldest in Paris: its bell tower dates from the year 1000.

Around it are the cafés where, in the twentieth century, everything was argued over: the Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots, side by side, with Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir spending their days there because it was heated and their homes were not. Today a coffee at a table costs seven euros, and you pay for the history, not the coffee: do it once and stop. For dinner, the streets behind — rue de Buci, rue Saint-André-des-Arts, the marché Saint-Germain — have real bistros at half the price.

Day 3 — The Marais and the left bank

6 km · 4 stops · 9am to 8pm · the day you stop sightseeing and start walking

Morning – The Marais

9:30am-1pm · Almost all free · Metro Saint-Paul or Chemin Vert · Open on Sundays, unlike half of Paris

The Marais — literally «the marsh» — is the district that survived: when Haussmann demolished medieval Paris to build the boulevards, he never reached here, which is why it is the only place where you can still see the narrow streets and aristocratic mansions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Its centre is place des Vosges, the oldest monumental square in Paris, unveiled in 1612: thirty-six identical pavilions of red brick and white stone, matching on all four sides, with arcades on the ground floor and a square garden in the middle. It is the model behind half the regular squares of Europe. At number 6 is Victor Hugo’s house, where he lived for sixteen years: free to visit.

Then wander it without a destination, which is the right approach. Rue des Rosiers is the heart of the Jewish quarter, with bakeries and falafel stalls — you queue and eat standing up for eight euros, the best cheap lunch in Paris. Rue des Francs-Bourgeois is the shopping street. The Musée Carnavalet, devoted to the city’s history, is free and occupies two Renaissance mansions: if you only enter one museum today, make it this one. A little further on is the Centre Pompidou, the building with the coloured pipes on the outside that infuriated everyone in 1977.

Early afternoon – Île Saint-Louis

1:30pm-3pm · Free · Walk 15 minutes south

Go down to the river and cross onto the Île Saint-Louis, the second island, next to the Cité. It is six hundred metres long, has a single main street, and has stayed an island in a figurative sense too: no monuments, no queues, just seventeenth-century mansions. You can walk right around it on the quais in twenty minutes.

Here is the most famous ice-cream shop in Paris, Berthillon, open since 1954: there is always a queue, it closes in August, and Parisians will tell you it is overrated while continuing to go there.

Afternoon – Panthéon and the Latin Quarter

3pm-5:30pm · Panthéon about €13, dome extra · Walk 15 minutes uphill

You climb toward the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, and this is the Latin Quarter: it is called that because for centuries the university students here spoke Latin. The Sorbonne dates from 1257 and is still there.

The Panthéon began life as a church dedicated to Saint Geneviève, was finished just as the Revolution broke out, and the revolutionaries turned it into a secular mausoleum for great French figures. In the crypt lie Voltaire, Rousseau, Hugo, Zola, Dumas, the Curies, Jean Moulin, and since 2021 Josephine Baker. In the nave hangs Foucault’s pendulum: in 1851 Foucault hung it here to demonstrate, in front of anyone who wanted to see, that the Earth rotates. The plane of the swing seems to turn, but it is you who are turning.

Nearby, if you have time: the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, just behind it, has the last surviving rood screen in Paris and is free; rue Mouffetard is one of the oldest market streets in the city; the bookshop Shakespeare and Company, on the riverbank opposite Notre-Dame, is a piece of literary history worth visiting just to look at.

Evening – Jardin du Luxembourg

5:30pm until closing · Free · Walk 8 minutes

You end where Parisians end their days. The Jardin du Luxembourg was commissioned by Marie de’ Medici in 1612, and it shows: the palace was built to resemble the Pitti Palace, because she was Florentine and homesick. Today the palace houses the French Senate.

The garden has the same iron chairs as the Tuileries, a pond where children push rented sailboats with a stick, as they have for over a century, boules courts, a carousel, and a hundred statues. It closes at sunset, and the guards walk around blowing a whistle to move you out: it is the most Parisian moment of the day.