Paris for first-time visitors
Of the 24 places on the 2 lists picked for first-time visitors in Paris, 7 post opening hours, the earliest opening at 07:00 and the latest closing at 02:00. Notre-Dame de Paris, Eiffel Tower and Père Lachaise Cemetery lead the picks.
Paris for first-timers, in numbers
- Picks on this page
- 24 places across 2 lists, led by Notre-Dame de Paris, Eiffel Tower, Père Lachaise Cemetery
- Posted hours
- 7 picks post hours earliest 07:00, latest 02:00; 3 open by 09:00, 6 past 21:00
Questions first-timers ask about Paris
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Must-see
Sainte-Chapelle on Île de la Cité. Louis IX's 1240s royal chapel replaced its walls with 15 metres of stained glass, floor to vaulted ceiling. On a sunny afternoon the upper room fills with colored light so saturated it tints your skin. Allow twenty minutes. Book a timed slot online.
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Best time to visit
Late April through mid-June and September through mid-October. Spring gives you long light, tulips in the Tuileries, and café terraces that finally feel warm enough to sit at. Early autumn is drier than spring, less crowded than summer, and the plane trees along Boulevard Saint-Germain turn gold against limestone. Expect 15–22°C and manageable hotel prices.
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Airport to city
From Charles de Gaulle (CDG), take the RER B train: roughly €11.80 ($14), 35 minutes to Châtelet-Les Halles, runs 4:50am to midnight. After hours, taxis have a fixed €55 fare to the Right Bank, €62 to the Left Bank: set by prefectural decree, non-negotiable. From Orly, the Orlybus to Denfert-Rochereau runs €11.50, 30 minutes.
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How to get there
Paris has two main airports: Charles de Gaulle (CDG, 25 km northeast) for international flights and Orly (ORY, 14 km south) for European and domestic routes. Direct from the US East Coast runs 7-8 hours at $650-1,100 round-trip on Delta, United, or Air France. From London, the Eurostar train (2h15, £80-200) beats flying.
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Getting around
The Métro does the heavy lifting. Sixteen lines reach every neighborhood worth visiting, and a Navigo Easy card loaded with t+ tickets at €2.15 each keeps you moving without fumbling for cash. Walk between sights in the same arrondissement: Paris is only about 10 km across. Uber works but costs four times the fare.
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Curated for first-timers
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Must-see attractions
Paris does not lack for lists, and it does not lack for opinions about which stops on those lists still earn the visitor's afternoon. This is a working editor's twelve, weighted toward the addresses that survive their own postcards: a cathedral on the Seine, an iron tower on the Champ de Mars, a cemetery on a hillside in the 75020 that has been quietly rearranging the tourist map for two centuries. Some are unavoidable and worth being unavoidable; others are here because a first-time visitor who skips them will hear about it for the rest of the trip. What ties them together is not grandeur, though there is plenty, but the fact that each one is anchored to a specific patch of ground, a specific address, a specific set of coordinates the city has been building around. Read the list in order if you want the canonical sequence; read it out of order if you already know Paris and want the argument for why these twelve, and not the other twelve, hold up.
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Best restaurants
Paris does not lack for restaurants, and that is precisely the problem. Within a ten-minute walk of the Hôtel de Ville you can eat badly at fifty places and remembered-for-years at a dozen, and the twelve below are the dozen. They cluster across the 75001, 75003, and 75004 postal codes: the streets around Rue des Archives, Rue des Lombards, and Rue Saint-Martin, where the Marais meets Châtelet and the kitchens run late. This is a list for a visitor who has one week, is tired of guessing, and wants to eat like the people who live upstairs. There is Italian cooked by people who mean it, Breton crêpes made to order, a Portuguese counter that never lets its custard cool, Vietnamese from a proper cantine, and a Lebanese kitchen that stays open past 23:00. No stars are chased here; no reservations are impossible. What each of these places has is a specific reason to be at its address: a cuisine done stubbornly well, an hour the neighbourhood keeps, a door that has been open longer than most bistros stay in business.
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