Paris in 3 days, on foot

This 3-day self-guided walking plan for Paris covers 44 narrated sights in an easy day-by-day order. Each day is split into a morning and an afternoon loop, and every stop has a two to three minute audio story in the Gingerguide app.

You set the pace: this is a suggested order, not a schedule. Walk it in 3 days, or stretch it out. Reorder freely; Paris rewards a detour.

Day 1

Morning

1. Eiffel Tower: The iconic iron lattice tower on the Champ de Mars, built for the 1889 World's Fair and now the most visited paid monument on Earth.
2. The Louvre: The world's largest and most-visited art museum, home to the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo and over 35,000 works spanning 9,000 years of civilisation.
3. Notre-Dame Cathedral: The Gothic masterpiece of medieval Paris, rebuilt after a devastating 2019 fire and reopened in December 2024 in all its restored glory.
4. Musée d'Orsay: The world's finest Impressionist museum, housed in a spectacular converted 1900 railway station, displaying masterworks by Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh and Degas.
5. Palace of Versailles: Louis XIV's magnificent royal palace 20 minutes from Paris, with its dazzling Hall of Mirrors, Marie Antoinette's Petit Trianon and 800 hectares of formal gardens.
6. Centre Pompidou: Europe's radical inside-out cultural centre, with all its pipes, ducts and structure on the exterior, housing the continent's largest collection of modern art.
7. Sacré-Cœur Basilica: The gleaming white Romano-Byzantine basilica crowning Montmartre hill, 130 metres above Paris, offering the most sweeping views over the city.
8. Arc de Triomphe: Napoleon's magnificent triumphal arch at the top of the Champs-Élysées, guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and offering a breathtaking 360° rooftop panorama.

Afternoon

1. Champs-Élysées: The world's most famous avenue, stretching 1.9 kilometres from Place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe, lined with luxury boutiques, cinemas and famous cafés.
2. Palais Royal & Gardens: A serene arcaded garden complex built by Cardinal Richelieu, now famous for Daniel Buren's striped columns and as a peaceful oasis steps from the Louvre.
3. Sainte-Chapelle: A Gothic jewel box of 1248, with fifteen floor-to-ceiling stained glass windows 15 metres tall that flood the upper chapel in a kaleidoscope of medieval coloured light.
4. Conciergerie: The medieval royal palace turned Revolutionary prison where Marie Antoinette was imprisoned before her execution in 1793, and from which 2,780 people were sent to the guillotine.
5. Place de la Bastille: The square where the fortress-prison was stormed on 14 July 1789, launching the French Revolution, today marked by the July Column and the modern Opéra Bastille.
6. Musée Rodin: Rodin's studio and home in the elegant Hôtel Biron, displaying The Thinker, The Kiss and The Gates of Hell in one of Paris's most beautiful sculpture gardens.
7. Les Invalides & Napoléon's Tomb: Louis XIV's grand veterans' hospital topped by a golden dome, sheltering the spectacular tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte beneath six nested coffins of red quartzite.

Day 2

Morning

1. Musée de l'Orangerie: A serene jewel in the Tuileries housing Monet's monumental Water Lilies panels in two specially designed oval rooms, the artist's final gift to France.
2. Palais de Tokyo: Europe's largest centre for contemporary creation, open until midnight and presenting provocative, ever-changing installations with no permanent collection.
3. Musée du Quai Branly: A stunning Jean Nouvel museum dedicated to the arts of Africa, Oceania, Asia and the Americas, with Patrick Blanc's extraordinary living green wall on its facade.
4. Père Lachaise Cemetery: The world's most visited cemetery, final resting place of Jim Morrison, Édith Piaf, Oscar Wilde, Chopin and Proust, with the haunting Wall of the Federals.
5. Montmartre: Paris's bohemian hilltop village, the former haunt of Picasso, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec and Renoir, still retaining its village atmosphere with cobbled streets and a working vineyard.
6. Moulin Rouge: The legendary 1889 cabaret at the foot of Montmartre hill, birthplace of the can-can, immortalised by Toulouse-Lautrec's iconic posters and still staging 700 spectacular shows a year.
7. Opéra Garnier: Napoleon III's flamboyant Second Empire opera house with its underground lake, Marc Chagall ceiling and the legendary Phantom's lair, one of the most ornate buildings in the world.
8. Place Vendôme: Paris's most elegant square, lined with luxury jewellers and the legendary Ritz hotel, centred on a column made from 1,250 Austrian and Russian cannons captured at Austerlitz.

Afternoon

1. Tuileries Garden: The grand formal garden stretching between the Louvre and Place de la Concorde, designed by André Le Nôtre in 1664, dotted with sculptures and the perfect Paris walk.
2. Place de la Concorde: Paris's largest square, where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were guillotined, now graced by a 3,300-year-old Egyptian obelisk and flanked by two monumental fountains.
3. Le Marais: Paris's most historic medieval district, home to Place des Vosges, the Jewish quarter, gay Paris, designer boutiques and the finest concentration of 17th-century hôtels particuliers.
4. Place des Vosges: Paris's oldest and most beautiful planned square, built by Henri IV in 1612, with arcaded mansions in the classic red-brick-and-stone style surrounding a garden where Victor Hugo once lived.
5. Musée Picasso Paris: The world's largest Picasso collection in a magnificent 17th-century Marais mansion, spanning 5,000 works through all his revolutionary periods from Blue to Cubist to late.
6. Île Saint-Louis: A tranquil 17th-century island in the Seine, perfectly preserved with its uniform architecture, prestigious addresses, and the legendary Berthillon ice cream that draws queues along the quai.
7. Latin Quarter: Paris's ancient student district around the Sorbonne, where Latin was spoken in the Middle Ages, home to buzzing cafés, bookshops, the Panthéon and the oldest street in Paris.

Day 3

Morning

1. Panthéon: France's secular mausoleum on the Left Bank hill, housing the remains of Marie Curie, Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo and over 80 other French national heroes.
2. Jardin du Luxembourg: Paris's most beloved park, built for Marie de Médicis in 1612, with its famous octagonal pool, model sailboats, beekeeping school, orchard, and the French Senate in the adjoining palace.
3. Saint-Germain-des-Prés: The Left Bank's most cultured neighbourhood, where Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus argued in the Café de Flore, home to Paris's oldest church and finest bookshops.
4. Canal Saint-Martin: A 4.5-kilometre canal built by Napoleon, lined with iron footbridges, swing bridges, and plane trees, now the hipster heart of Paris with the city's coolest cafés and boutiques.
5. Belleville & Street Art: Paris's most diverse and creative neighbourhood, birthplace of Édith Piaf, with the city's finest concentration of street art and vibrant immigrant communities from North Africa and China.
6. Trocadéro & Palais de Chaillot: The iconic curved esplanade facing the Eiffel Tower across the Seine, offering Paris's most celebrated viewpoint, flanked by the twin wings of the 1937 Palais de Chaillot.
7. Catacombes de Paris: The world's most famous ossuary, containing the remains of over six million Parisians arranged in vast subterranean galleries beneath the 14th arrondissement.

Afternoon

1. Marché aux Puces de Saint-Ouen: The world's largest antique and flea market, with over 2,000 dealers spread across multiple sub-markets in Saint-Ouen, just north of the Paris city limits at Porte de Clignancourt.
2. Musée Carnavalet: History of Paris: The free museum of Parisian history, housed in a pair of magnificent 16th-century mansions in Le Marais, tracing the city from prehistoric times to the 20th century with Marcel Proust's bedroom reconstructed inside.
3. Musée National du Moyen Âge: Cluny: France's greatest medieval museum, set atop visible Gallo-Roman thermal baths, home to the six extraordinary Lady and the Unicorn tapestries woven in the 15th century and now recognised as UNESCO heritage.
4. La Défense & Grande Arche: Paris's modernist business district, anchored by the Grande Arche, a hollow cube 112 metres tall completed in 1989, aligned on the same historic Grand Axis as the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs-Élysées, and the Louvre.
5. Château de Fontainebleau: The largest royal château in France, located 60km south of Paris, with over 1,500 rooms spanning eight centuries of royal history, the site of Napoleon's emotional farewell to his Imperial Guard in 1814.
6. Musée Marmottan Monet: The world's largest Monet collection, over 100 works in a converted hunting lodge in western Paris, including the painting that gave Impressionism its name: Impression, Sunrise, painted in Le Havre in 1872.
7. Galeries Lafayette & Printemps: Paris's grandest department stores side by side on the Boulevard Haussmann, crowned by the 1912 Art Nouveau steel-and-glass dome of Galeries Lafayette, the most spectacular department store interior in the world, with a free rooftop terrace overlooking the Opera.

Full Paris guide and all stops → · Other itineraries: 2 days