Walking Tours in Paris with StreetLore

Popular spots covered in Paris

6 hand-picked stops with researched narration. Every listing below ships with a curated lore beat — the same content the app speaks while you walk past.

1. 

   01

   Notre-Dame de Paris

   historic

   Construction began in 1163 and dragged on for almost two hundred years. One of the first buildings in the world to use flying buttresses — the arches you can see propping up the outside — which is what let the walls go so high and the windows so big. The bronze medallion set in the pavement of the square in front, the Point Zéro, is the spot from which all French road distances are measured. The 2019 fire nearly took the whole thing down; the spire collapsed into the nave. Reopened in December 2024 after a five-year restoration. The Emmanuel bell in the south tower, cast in 1686, survived everything, including the Revolution, which melted most French church bells into cannon.

2. 

   02

   Eiffel Tower

   landmark

   Built for the 1889 World's Fair to celebrate the centennial of the French Revolution. Gustave Eiffel's team — including a young engineer named Maurice Koechlin who actually drew up the design — won a competition with a proposal nobody thought was possible: an iron lattice tower 300 metres tall. Thousands of Parisians signed a petition against it when it was going up; it was supposed to be torn down after 20 years. Saved because it turned out to be an excellent radio antenna. Painted every seven years, 60 tonnes of paint per coat. The top actually tilts by about 18 cm in hot weather as the sun-facing side expands. Each of the four pillars points to a compass direction and has the names of 72 French scientists engraved into the frieze.

3. 

   03

   The Louvre

   museum

   Originally a 12th-century fortress — the foundations of the medieval keep are still visible in the basement if you know where to look. Became a royal palace, then a museum after the Revolution in 1793. Houses 35,000 works on display, out of 615,000 in the collection. The glass pyramid, finished in 1989 by I. M. Pei, was hated at the time — critics called it an Egyptian death symbol looming over a French palace. Now it's iconic and unthinkable to remove. The Mona Lisa draws a crowd of thousands a day, painted small (77 × 53 cm), positioned behind bulletproof glass since 1956 when a Bolivian man threw a rock at it. Don't skip the Winged Victory of Samothrace on the staircase; most people walk past it on the way to Mona Lisa.

4. 04

   Musée d'Orsay

   museum

   The national museum of 19th-century art, in a converted Beaux-Arts railway station that was built for the 1900 World's Fair and closed by 1939 because its platforms had become too short for modern trains. The conversion in 1986 kept the vaulted glass roof and the enormous station clock you can look through from the top floor. The Impressionist and Post-Impressionist collection is the best anywhere — Monet, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Van Gogh's self-portrait and bedroom, the Gauguin Tahiti canvases. Chronologically follows from where the Louvre ends (1848) and hands off to Pompidou (1914). Quieter than the Louvre; the top-floor Impressionist rooms are the busiest stretch. The café under the station clock is a genuinely good lunch spot.

5. 

   05

   Palace of Versailles

   historic

   Louis XIV's palace 20km south-west of Paris — technically not in Paris but most visitors do it as a day trip. What started as his father's small hunting lodge got rebuilt from 1661 onward into the most extravagant palace in Europe, specifically to force the aristocracy to live under the king's eye. 2,300 rooms, 67 staircases, 700 courtiers and 4,000 servants by the end. The Hall of Mirrors — 357 mirrors on 17 arches facing 17 windows onto the gardens — is where the Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1919. The gardens, designed by André Le Nôtre, are bigger than Central Park. Fountains only run on specific days. Marie Antoinette's fake rustic hamlet is a long walk from the main palace — rent a bike from the Grand Canal area, otherwise you won't see half of it.

6. 

   06

   Sainte-Chapelle

   historic

   A royal chapel built by Louis IX in 1248 to house what he believed were the Crown of Thorns and a fragment of the True Cross (he'd paid more for the relics than for the chapel). From the outside it looks modest, jammed into the courtyard of the Palais de Justice. Upstairs is one of the great rooms of medieval Europe: 15 stained-glass windows, 15 metres tall, covering 600 square metres of glass — about two-thirds of it original 13th-century glass — telling 1,113 biblical scenes. The colours are specifically the deep blue and red that only medieval glassmakers could achieve. Go on a sunny morning when the east-facing windows light up; the whole interior goes blue and red. Small, always queued, and worth every minute.

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