What to see in Paris in 3 days: day-by-day itinerary

Your first Parisian decision is the last leg of the journey, and it pays to make it on the ground rather than in advance. Whichever door you come through — the glass halls of Charles de Gaulle, the smaller breezier Orly, or the great train sheds of Gare du Nord and Gare de Lyon — the centre is a straightforward hop with three honest options: the RER commuter trains, the official taxi ranks, or a pre-booked car. The RER B corridor is the classic north-south artery, tying the northern airports and Gare du Nord to Chatelet and Saint-Michel, which puts you within a short walk of an Ile Saint-Louis hotel. Because timetables and engineering works change, keep the timing loose and check the operator's service news the day you fly; the RATP network publishes current and upcoming closures on its own site as lines are upgraded, so a two-minute look the night before is worth more than any printed plan. Practically: load a Navigo pass before you travel if you can, or validate a ticket on your phone if it's compatible, and you'll skip the longest queues at the station machines. At the airport, follow the signs for the train into Paris rather than the touts in the arrivals hall; the licensed ranks are clearly signed and their fares posted. If you land at Gare du Nord, the walk south through the 10th to the river takes you past the Gare de l'Est facade and the canal-side streets — a first taste of real Paris that costs nothing but forty minutes. And then there's the moment you come up the stairs into the light: the zinc roofs, the plane trees, the smell of diesel and bread. Save the big reveal — the river, the tower — for this evening. Today's reward is up on a hill.

There is one base that makes these particular three days work, and it's the little triangle formed by the Ile Saint-Louis, the Latin Quarter and Saint-Germain-des-Pres. From here the Ile de la Cite — Notre-Dame and Sainte-Chapelle, two of your must-haves — is a ten- to fifteen-minute walk, the Latin Quarter walk of Day 2 begins at your doorstep, and Montmartre and the Eiffel quarter are each a single metro ride away in opposite directions. That geography is precisely what keeps the plan inside your rule about not crossing the city twice: on any given day you travel outward in one direction and come home, rather than zigzagging across Paris. The Ile Saint-Louis itself is a charming base for a couple — a 17th-century real-estate speculation that succeeded, now all narrow streets, quiet quays and shuttered windows, with the famous Berthillon glacier on rue Saint-Louis-en-l'Ile and almost no traffic. The Latin Quarter, one bridge south, trades some of that hush for cafes, bookshops and the energy of students; Saint-Germain-des-Pres is the polished, pricier version of the same Left Bank idea. Check in, drop the bags, wash the aeroplane off your face, and step out for a first orientation walk along the quais — twenty minutes to the Pont Neuf, ten to Notre-Dame's parvis. That short promenade does more for jet lag than a nap, and it puts the island's shape in your head before the real sightseeing begins tomorrow.

Montmartre only became Paris in 1860, and it has never quite stopped behaving like the village it was — a hill of windmills, gardens and vineyards that stood outside the city walls and therefore outside its taxes, which is how it became cheap, and therefore how it became the capital of bohemian painting for thirty glorious years. Picasso, Modigliani, Utrillo, Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec all worked up here, in studios with no heating; it was in the ramshackle wooden Bateau-Lavoir that Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907 and turned modern art on its head. This is one of your must-haves, and the walk is the best way to meet it. Start on rue Lepic, the butte's old market street, passing the bright cafe at number 15 made famous by the film Amelie — the Cafe des Deux Moulins — and the last two windmills of the Moulin de la Galette. Higher up, look for the charming pink house at 2 rue de l'Abreuvoir that Utrillo never stopped painting, and the Clos Montmartre vineyard on rue des Saules, planted in 1933 and still harvested each October for charity during the Fete des Vendanges. Then the Place du Tertre, where easels have outnumbered artists since the 1920s and portrait painters still call out to passing couples — for all the crowds, a sketch of the two of you is a wonderfully silly souvenir. Comfortable shoes are essential: this is steep, cobbled and full of staircase shortcuts. Late afternoon is the sweet spot, because the day-trippers thin out exactly as the light goes golden, and the whole hill starts to smell of roast chicken and wet stone.

The basilica was begun in 1875 and paid for by public subscription as an act of national penance after the Franco-Prussian War and the upheaval of the Commune; it was consecrated in 1919, which makes it one of the youngest churches in Paris and, on a summit some 130 metres above sea level, certainly the highest. Paul Abadie drew on Romano-Byzantine models rather than Gothic — the silhouette of domes and the pale stone are why it looks like nothing else in the city. That stone is Chateau-Landon travertine, which whitens as rain moves through it and releases calcite; the basilica literally gets cleaner with weather. But you came for the view, and for the classic viewpoints your trip is built around, this one is the grandest. From the forecourt and the long staircases below, the whole city unrolls — the Opera's roofline, the Pantheon's dome on its hill, the towers of the Conciergerie, and the Eiffel Tower standing off to the southwest like a piece of set dressing. In mid-April the sun sets close to 20:45, so arriving around a quarter to seven means watching the light go long and pink across the rooftops before the street lamps come on; on a clear evening the tower's beacon starts its sweep and the whole scene turns to velvet. Inside, the basilica is dim, quiet and mosaicked, with the great apse mosaic of Christ in Majesty above the altar — keep voices low and shoulders covered, because this is a working sanctuary rather than a monument.

Louis IX — Saint Louis — bought what he believed to be the Crown of Thorns and fragments of the True Cross from the beleaguered Latin Empire of Constantinople in the late 1230s, then spent several times the price of the relics building a chapel worthy of them. Begun around 1242 and consecrated in 1248, the Sainte-Chapelle is the high-water mark of Rayonnant Gothic: the masons stripped the walls away until almost nothing was left but buttresses, tracery and colour. For your love of Gothic churches, this is the summit of the trip. Upstairs, in the chapel the king and his court used, fifteen windows some fifteen metres tall hold 1,113 separate scenes of stained glass — a complete medieval picture-Bible running from Genesis around to the Apocalypse, meant to be read clockwise from the north. Stand at the west end, where the rose window of 1485 blazes above the doorway, and look east: in the morning the light comes straight down the axis and the whole room feels suspended in blue. The lower chapel, given over to the palace staff, has a star-vaulted ceiling painted with the fleur-de-lys of Castile and France. There's a human story here too. The Crown of Thorns survived the Revolution, was entrusted to Notre-Dame in 1806 and was carried out of the burning cathedral in 2019; the chapel lost its own spire to a 17th-century blaze, gained a new one in the 19th century, and has been restored in phases ever since. It is your single timed entry today, so give it an unhurried hour rather than a checklist visit.

Notre-Dame has been the centre of Parisian gravity since Bishop Maurice de Sully laid the foundation stone in 1163; the west facade with its Gallery of Kings was finished within a lifetime, and the cathedral was substantially complete by the mid-14th century. Look for the Last Judgement over the central portal — the saved going left, the damned dragged right — and the 28 kings of Judah above it, decapitated in 1793 during the Revolution and replaced in the 19th century. This is also the building that crowned Napoleon in 1804, and the one Victor Hugo rescued with a novel: the 1831 Notre-Dame de Paris shamed the city into restoring the cathedral, a project that gave it the flèche and the chimeras perched on the galleries. Then came 15 April 2019, an evening fire that took the roof, the spire and the medieval timber framing known as the forest, and left the world watching live. The restoration that followed — five years, a thousand craftspeople, oak cut by hand from French forests — returned the cathedral to worship in December 2024, with the spire rebuilt to Viollet-le-Duc's design and limestone that now glows pale gold inside. Your visit comes the day after the anniversary of that fire, which lends the parvis a quiet weight. Entry to the cathedral is free rather than ticketed, so it doesn't count against your one-timed-entry rule — but it does mean a queue. Go early or late, and see the rest of the island while you wait: the bronze star of Point Zero set into the paving, from which French road distances are traditionally measured, and the flower market at Place Louis-Lepine, trading on this spot since 1808.

Eglise Saint-Severin is the Latin Quarter's own flamboyant Gothic jewel, built up between the 13th and 16th centuries above a much older site, and it hides one of the most delightful details in Paris: in the ambulatory, a single column twists upward like a palm tree, and from it the ribs of the double ambulatory fan out overhead. Look for it at the far end, then spend a moment with the 15th-century stained glass and the pale, asymmetrical interior — this is a parish church rather than a monument, entered free, and for a lover of Gothic churches the difference in mood is exactly the point. A few steps away, Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre keeps a much older, darker Romanesque calm. The walk from there is a lesson in how medieval Paris was laid out: narrow streets named for trades — rue de la Parcheminerie, rue de la Harpe — the courtyard of the Sorbonne and its 17th-century chapel holding Richelieu's tomb, the College de France, and up the Montagne Sainte-Genevieve to the Pantheon, Soufflot's vast neoclassical temple to the nation's great dead. Below it stand the medieval hotel of Cluny and the ruins of the Roman baths, the Thermes, half swallowed by the museum that grew around them. Finish in the Luxembourg Gardens, laid out for Marie de Medicis from 1612: the Medici fountain in its green shade, the metal chairs, the chess players, the palace where the French Senate sits. All of it is free and all of it is walkable — no tickets, no queues, which is exactly what the second half of a Sainte-Chapelle day should be.

This stretch of the Seine is part of the UNESCO-listed riverbanks of Paris, and the reason is walking-distance obvious: on one side the Louvre with its Cour Carree, on the other the island's prow, and between them nothing but sky reflected in water. Along the parapets run the bouquinistes' dark-green boxes — second-hand booksellers who have been a fixture of these quays for centuries and are sometimes called the world's largest open-air bookshop, though most shut up their boxes by dusk, so come before the light goes. The Pont Neuf, despite its name, is the oldest bridge still standing over the Seine in Paris, finished in 1607 under Henri IV and revolutionary for being built without houses on it. Its little semicircular bastions, once the city's favourite place to lean and watch the river, still work beautifully for exactly that; the bronze equestrian statue of Henri IV on the middle span was melted down during the Revolution and recast in 1818. Below the bridge, at the island's pointed tip, the Square du Vert-Galant offers the loveliest view back up at the bridge and the Conciergerie's towers. Come here with twenty minutes to spare before dinner and let the light do the talking: in mid-April the sun lingers until nearly a quarter to nine, turning the limestone to honey and the water to pewter, and the Conciergerie's towers come up floodlit while you watch.

The most beautiful view of the Eiffel Tower isn't from the tower — it's from the opposite bank, standing between the two curved wings of the Palais de Chaillot on the hill of Chaillot. The palace was built for the 1937 Exposition Internationale on the bones of an earlier Moorish fantasy, the Palais du Trocadero, and its two pavilions were designed to open a frame onto the tower across the river: a deliberate piece of urban stagecraft that still works perfectly, which is why nearly every photograph you have ever seen of Paris seems to have been taken from these paving stones. Inside, the palace holds the Cite de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine and the Musee de l'Homme, both ticketed — and both deliberately left off today's plan, because your last morning deserves open air rather than another booked slot, and your rule allows only one timed entry a day. For your interest in classic viewpoints, come early: before ten the esplanade belongs to a few joggers and photographers, and the morning sun sits behind the tower, drawing its ironwork sharply against the sky. From the terraces, walk down through the gardens of the Trocadero — fountains, statues and a long green axis — and cross the Pont d'Iena, commissioned by Napoleon after his 1806 victory at Jena and lined with four equestrian statues. If April hands you rain, the palace's sheltered terraces and the cafes along avenue du President-Wilson will keep you dry while the clouds do dramatic things to the tower's silhouette.

Built for the 1889 Exposition Universelle, the fair that marked the centenary of the Revolution, the Eiffel Tower was meant to be temporary — a 300-metre iron mast by Gustave Eiffel's engineering firm, assembled from roughly eighteen thousand pieces and something like two and a half million rivets, and scheduled to come down after twenty years. A protest letter signed by leading artists and writers called it a factory chimney and a stain on Paris; the critics have been gloriously proved wrong, and it was the tower's height and its usefulness as a radio antenna that saved it. Eiffel cannily offered the army the summit for experiments, and the tower has been broadcasting ever since. Walk the base and look up: the four lattice legs, the iron lacework, the glass floor of the first level, and the frieze of some seventy-two names — French scientists, engineers and mathematicians — engraved in gold letters around the first platform. Then take the Champ de Mars, the old military parade ground of the Ecole Militaire, and look back along the long lawn to your first stop: the tower framed at one end, the Ecole Militaire's colonnaded facade at the other, the whole axis laid out like a stage. If the ascent tempts you, the lifts require a timed ticket booked well in advance and would be today's single timed entry — a spectacular thing to do if your onward train or flight is late in the day, and a needless risk if it isn't. The ground-level view, the gardens and a plate of sandwiches on the grass are, for my money, the better use of a departure morning.

The esplanade is the great lawned forecourt of the Hotel des Invalides, founded by Louis XIV in 1670 as a home and hospital for wounded soldiers, which it remained for centuries. Behind its classical facade the buildings now hold the Army Museum and, beneath the gilded dome of Jules Hardouin-Mansart's church, Napoleon's tomb — a tomb so large it had to be sunk into a circular crypt, and a building worth admiring from the outside even today: the dome is one of the finest pieces of 17th-century architecture on the Left Bank, and it gilds beautifully in the early afternoon. Walking the esplanade costs nothing and is one of the most generous spaces in Paris — flat, uncrowded, lined with plane trees, with the tower at one end of the sightline and the dome at the other. It is also the perfect pivot for a departure day: ten minutes from rue Cler, ten from the tower, and sitting right on the Invalides transport node, whose metro and RER lines can drop you back at the hotel to collect bags or carry you on towards your onward hub. You're not going inside the museums or the tomb today — those are timed tickets, and by now you'll want the last hour for the city rather than for a turnstile. But stand for a minute in front of the dome, then turn around and look back at the Eiffel Tower over the rooftops: that double view is the memory to carry to the station.