Paris, narrated properly

What's inside

• 01Eiffel TowerBuilt to be taken down after twenty years — it survived because the radio aerial on top turned out to be useful11 min
• 02Notre-Dame CathedralBegun in 1163, largely finished by 1260, and open again since December 2024 after five years of rebuilding12 min
• 03Sacré-Cœur BasilicaThe stone bleaches itself white in the rain, which is why it never blackened like the rest of Paris20 min
• 04MontmartreThe hill is gypsum — the Paris in plaster of Paris — and mining it until 1860 left the ground so hollow the basilica had to be pinned some forty metres down13 min
• 05Palais GarnierFive floors under the stage there is a flooded cistern with fish in it, and the fire brigade dives in it15 min
• 06Sainte-ChapelleThe clerks who filled it with filing cabinets accidentally shielded two-thirds of the medieval glass20 min
• 07ConciergerieThe most famous prison of the Terror never had a guillotine, and the name is nothing grander than a job title19 min
• 08Covered Passages of ParisThe panorama tickets sold here paid for Robert Fulton's prototype submarine14 min
• 09Arc de TriompheIn 1758 an architect proposed a 25-metre stone elephant on this spot, entered by a staircase in its belly26 min
• 10The Louvre MuseumA passing plumber unlocked a jammed door for the man walking out with the Mona Lisa23 min
• 11Les InvalidesThe veterans ordered to disable the muskets on the night of 13 July 1789 worked so slowly that the job was never finished18 min
• 12PanthéonFoucault's invitations in 1851 read "You are invited to come and see the Earth turn"15 min
• 13Musée d'OrsayOrson Welles filmed The Trial inside it in 1962, for the simple reason that the station had been abandoned and was empty16 min
• 14Père Lachaise CemeteryIn its first year it managed thirteen graves, so the city imported Molière and La Fontaine to fix the problem13 min

Every one of those runs in full offline. Tap a landmark above to read the research behind it, where a page has been written.

Why a stop runs twenty minutes instead of ninety seconds

Each landmark starts as a written dossier — earliest history, construction, architecture, archaeology, the people, the myths, and what is actually known — researched and written out before a word of it is narrated.

Each claim in that dossier carries how confident the research is, and the sources are listed. That rating survives into the guide: where something is only a story, the guide says it is a story rather than repeating it as fact. It is the reason a stop can afford to be twenty minutes long. There is genuinely that much to say, and saying it accurately takes the time it takes.

Three Paris stops most guides skip

The famous eight are on every list. These three are the ones that reward a long guide, and two of them are indoors — useful on the kind of afternoon Paris specialises in.

• Sainte-Chapelle — twenty minutes on a building that is essentially a stone cage holding fifteen medieval windows, built to house a relic that cost more than the chapel around it.
• The covered passages — fourteen minutes in the glass-roofed arcades of the Right Bank, where shopping first became a thing people did for pleasure, and which most visitors walk straight past.
• The Palais Garnier — fifteen minutes on an opera house with a flooded cistern five floors beneath the stage, which the Paris fire brigade still uses for underwater training.

How it works on the day

Download Paris over wi-fi before you go. After that the whole guide plays on aeroplane mode, on the Métro, and on roaming you would rather not pay for.

Start a stop, lock the phone and put it in your pocket — it keeps playing, and you can pause or skip from your headphones or the lock screen. The app can also show you an optional list of landmarks within about a kilometre, so you notice the things you did not know to look for. Decline that permission and everything else still works.

Walking it

The eight are not a route, and they are not meant to be done in a day. Roughly, though: the Louvre, the covered passages and the Palais Garnier sit close together on the Right Bank; Notre-Dame and Sainte-Chapelle are a few minutes apart on the Île de la Cité; the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe anchor the west; and Sacré-Cœur is up the hill on its own.

Play them in any order. Nothing in the guide assumes you have heard another stop first.