Five days in Paris: The Art of Slowing Down in the Capital of Speed

An evening on the islands, one great museum a day and a river between them, an early start on Montmartre, and a last morning in the Marais.

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Length
5 days, 4 nights
Where you stay
Paris
Places
13 across 5 days
OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles Data from OpenStreetMap

Paris disappoints a surprising number of people, and almost always for the same reason. They arrive with a list of fourteen monuments, spend the week crossing the city between them, and go home having queued in three arrondissements without ever sitting down anywhere. The city has a name for the extreme version of this, the Paris syndrome, which tells you how common the milder version is.

Five days is enough to avoid it. Two of the world's largest museums sit twenty minutes apart on opposite banks of the Seine, and giving each a day of its own is the single decision that makes the rest of the trip pleasant. Around them there is a compact medieval centre on two river islands, a hill in the north with a basilica on it, and a quarter of seventeenth century streets in the east.

Almost none of that needs a metro ticket. The historic core of Paris is about six kilometres across and the walking between sights is frequently better than the sights: the booksellers' boxes along the quays, the bridge you cross twice a day, the bakery queue at eight in the morning that tells you which one is the good one.

Highlights

  • Sainte-Chapelle at opening, when the upper chapel is lit and nearly empty
  • The Louvre with a timed ticket and a plan to see three rooms rather than everything
  • Impressionists in a converted railway station, then Rodin's garden after lunch
  • Montmartre at nine in the morning, and the Opéra Garnier's staircase after lunch
  • A last morning under the arcades of the oldest planned square in the city

Where to stay

Paris, four nights

Paris is small for a city of its fame. Two point two million people live inside the ring road, on a patch you can cross on foot in two hours, which is why so much of it is legible from street level in a way that London or Los Angeles never are.

It is also organised in a spiral. The arrondissements wind outwards from the Louvre in numerical order, so a first arrondissement address is dead central and a twentieth is on the edge. Anywhere in the 1st to the 7th, or the 11th around Bastille, puts most of these five days on foot. The area immediately around Gare du Nord is convenient for arriving and not much else.

Day by day

Day 1 in Paris

Notre-Dame and the two river islands

Book nothing today. Whatever time you land, the islands in the middle of the Seine are the right introduction: they are where the city started, everything on them is outdoors and free, and they are ten minutes from most of where you will sleep.

Notre-Dame reopened in December 2024 after the fire of April 2019, and entry is free but the queue on the square can be long in the afternoon. If it is, the exterior is genuinely the better half anyway: walk around to the east end, where the flying buttresses are, and look at it from the garden behind rather than from the front.

Then cross the short bridge to the second island. Île Saint-Louis is a single seventeenth century street of stone houses with the river on both sides, and it has almost nothing to see, which after a flight is the point.

  1. 17:00

    Notre-Dame de Paris

    Religious

    Begun in the twelfth century, finished in the fourteenth, and open again since December 2024 after five years of repairs. Free to enter, and the queue on the square is at its shortest early in the morning and in the last hour before closing.

  2. 18:30

    Île Saint-Louis

    Nature

    Five minutes east over the footbridge. One street down the spine, quays on both sides, and Berthillon ice cream, which has a queue outside it and deserves one.

  3. 20:00

    Dinner in the Latin Quarter

    Eat

    South bank, ten minutes from the island. Avoid the narrow lanes immediately behind Saint-Michel, where every restaurant has a man outside; walk five minutes further up the hill and the prices halve.

With more time: With a morning arrival, spend the extra hours on the quays. The bouquinistes and their green boxes run along both banks from the islands, and Shakespeare and Company, the English bookshop opposite the cathedral, is worth twenty minutes.

Day 2 in Paris

Sainte-Chapelle, the Louvre and the Tuileries

Sainte-Chapelle first, at opening, because it is small and it fills. Louis IX built it in the 1240s as a reliquary for what he believed to be the Crown of Thorns, which is why the upper chapel is essentially fifteen windows with a minimum of wall between them. Go on a bright day if you have a choice: the whole effect is sunlight through coloured glass, and on a grey morning it simply is not there.

Then the Louvre, on a timed afternoon ticket, with one instruction: do not try to see it. The collection was assembled for completeness rather than quality and two full days would not cover it. Pick two or three wings, look at those properly, and leave when your feet say so.

Come out into the Tuileries at the end of the afternoon. The gardens run west from the palace along the river, they cost nothing, and there are chairs by the ponds that people move to follow the sun.

  1. 09:00

    Sainte-Chapelle

    Religious

    Fifteen windows of mostly thirteenth century glass, telling the Bible around the walls of a single room, with the Apocalypse in the rose at the west end. Security is airport style because the courts are next door, so allow twenty minutes before you are inside.

  2. 12:00

    Lunch on the right bank

    Eat

    Cross the Pont Neuf and eat before you go in. There is food inside the Louvre and none of it is worth the time it costs you.

  3. 13:30

    Musée du Louvre

    Historic

    Egypt, Greece, Rome, medieval Europe and Napoleon in one palace. The Mona Lisa is behind glass at the far end of a crowd and takes ten minutes to reach; the Egyptian rooms and the Richelieu sculpture courts, twenty metres away, are close to empty.

  4. 17:00

    Jardin des Tuileries

    Nature

    The formal gardens west of the museum, laid out where the Tuileries palace stood until the Commune burned it in 1871. At the far end, the Orangerie holds Monet's water lilies in two oval rooms built to his own instructions.

With more time: If the Louvre is closed on the day you are here, swap in the medieval museum in the Cluny baths on the south bank: Roman thermal halls, and the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries in a room of their own.

Day 3 in Paris

The Orsay, the Rodin garden and the Eiffel Tower

The Orsay is the museum most people prefer, and it is a fraction of the size of the Louvre. It occupies a Beaux-Arts railway station finished in 1900 for the world's fair and saved from demolition seventy years later, and the great clock still faces the platform hall. The Impressionist rooms are on the top floor. Start there, before the coaches, and work down.

Rodin is twenty minutes west and is the better afternoon than any second museum: an eighteenth century house with a walled garden, and enough of the sculpture out among the roses that on a fine day you barely go indoors.

Leave the Eiffel Tower until the evening. It is a twenty five minute walk on from the Rodin past the Invalides, or one stop on the métro, and after dark it sparkles for five minutes on the hour, which is worth timing your arrival around.

  1. 09:30

    Musée d'Orsay

    Culture

    Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas and Van Gogh under a station roof, hung in the order the movement happened. Two and a half hours is honest; the top floor first, then the sculpture in the old platform hall on the way out.

  2. 12:30

    Lunch off the rue de Bellechasse

    Eat

    The 7th is a government quarter, which means unremarkable streets and reliably good weekday lunch menus aimed at people from the ministries.

  3. 14:15

    Musée Rodin

    Culture

    The Thinker, the Burghers of Calais and the unfinished Gates of Hell, most of them outside in the garden. Buy the garden-only ticket if the weather is good; it is cheaper, and the major bronzes are all out there.

  4. 18:30

    Eiffel Tower

    Architecture

    Finished in 1889 for the world's fair, meant to be dismantled after twenty years, and saved because it made a useful radio mast. Book the lift ahead or take the stairs to the second floor, which is quicker, cheaper, and close enough to pick out streets.

With more time: You do not have to go up the tower to enjoy it. The Champ de Mars behind it is a public lawn where half of Paris sits with a bottle and a baguette on a summer evening, and the view from the terrace across the river is the one on all the postcards.

Day 4 in Paris

Montmartre in the morning, the Opéra after lunch

Montmartre is a hill and a village that Paris grew around, and it is at its worst between eleven and four. Go early. The basilica opens well before the coaches arrive, and the steep lanes behind it, which are the actual reason to come, are empty at nine.

The funicular from Place Saint-Pierre saves you the staircase for the price of a métro ticket. Ignore the portrait painters in the square behind the church unless you want a caricature, and walk two streets north instead, where there is a working vineyard and a surviving windmill.

In the afternoon, come back down for the Opéra Garnier. It is fifteen minutes on the métro and a complete change of register: the most extravagant interior in the city, and mostly open to visitors during the day because the ballet is what still performs there.

  1. 09:30

    Sacré-Cœur

    Religious

    White because the stone bleaches in rain, and built between 1875 and 1914 as an act of penance after the Commune, on the hill where the uprising began. Free to enter. The dome climb is a separate ticket and a few hundred steps.

  2. 11:15

    Musée de Montmartre

    Culture

    A seventeenth century house with a garden, on the quiet side of the hill, where Renoir kept a studio. Small, cheap, and about the artists' Montmartre rather than the view from it.

  3. 13:00

    Lunch below the hill

    Eat

    Walk down to the streets around the Abbesses métro entrance, one of the two surviving glass Guimard canopies, and eat there. Everything within sight of the basilica is priced for people who will not come back.

  4. 15:00

    Opéra Garnier

    Culture

    Gold, marble and red velvet, with a grand staircase built to be walked down and a ceiling Chagall painted in 1964. The Phantom of the Opera is set here, and the underground lake is not quite invented: there is a water tank in the foundations, put there because the site kept flooding.

With more time: The Galeries Lafayette department store is two minutes from the opera house and has a stained glass dome over its main hall and a free roof terrace, which is the cheapest good view in central Paris.

Day 5 in Paris

The Marais, then the airport

A short last morning in the quarter that escaped the nineteenth century rebuilding. Everywhere else in central Paris, Haussmann knocked the medieval streets down and put boulevards through them; here the seventeenth century mansions are still standing, most of them now museums, schools or apartments.

Start under the arcades of Place des Vosges, which is thirty minutes from either main station and works as a first stop or a last one. Then the city museum in two of those mansions, which is free, and where five days of half-understood buildings finally join up.

Lunch in the Jewish quarter a few streets west, and go.

  1. 09:30

    Place des Vosges

    Nature

    The oldest planned square in Paris, finished in 1612, thirty six identical houses of red brick and pale stone around a garden. Victor Hugo lived in the corner house for sixteen years, and it is now a free museum.

  2. 10:30

    Musée Carnavalet

    Culture

    The history of the city in 140 rooms of two old mansions, from the Roman settlement to the Revolution, including Proust's bedroom reconstructed room and all. Free, five minutes from the square, and an hour is plenty.

  3. 12:15

    Last lunch in the old Jewish quarter

    Eat

    Ten minutes west, where the falafel queues form and half the shops shut on Saturdays. Quick, cheap and the right last meal before a train to the airport.

With more time: With a later flight, the Picasso museum is in another Marais mansion five minutes away and holds the works Picasso still owned when he died, which means the ones he did not want to sell.

Before you go

Getting in from the airports

From Charles de Gaulle, the RER B is the fastest way in and costs about 13 euros, running every ten minutes or so and stopping at Gare du Nord, Châtelet-Les Halles and Saint-Michel Notre-Dame. Any of those three puts you within a short walk or one change of most central hotels. A taxi is a fixed fare to central Paris and takes anything from forty minutes to an hour and a half depending on the ring road.

Landing after midnight is the awkward case: the RER stops and the Noctilien night buses take over, which is slower and less obvious than it sounds when you are tired. If your flight lands late, budget for the taxi.

Getting around

The métro is dense, frequent and the fastest way to cover anything over two kilometres. Buy tickets in the Île-de-France Mobilités app rather than queueing at a machine, and note that a single ticket does not let you transfer between the métro and a bus.

That said, four of these five days are walkable end to end. Île de la Cité to the Louvre is fifteen minutes on foot, the Louvre to the Orsay is ten across the river. Save the métro for Montmartre and for the Eiffel Tower, which are the two genuinely distant things here.

What to book, and when things close

The Louvre effectively requires a timed slot booked in advance, and that holds even if you have a museum pass. Book it the week before, take the earliest afternoon slot you can, and enter through the Carrousel entrance under the shopping arcade rather than the pyramid if the queue outside looks bad.

The Louvre closes on Tuesdays. Most of the other big museums, including the Orsay and the Rodin, close on Mondays instead. Getting this wrong is the most common way to lose a day here, so check the two museum days before you fix which day is which. Sainte-Chapelle sits inside the courts complex and has an airport-style security check, which is the real queue rather than the ticket desk.

Manners, and the small scams

Say bonjour on entering a shop or a bakery, and bonjour madame or bonjour monsieur if you are addressing somebody directly. This is not optional politeness in France, it is the opening of the transaction, and skipping it accounts for a good share of the rudeness visitors report.

Violent crime is rare and pickpocketing is not. The lower steps below Sacré-Coeur are the classic spot for the friendship bracelet approach, where somebody loops a string around your finger and then asks for money for it: keep your hands down, keep walking, do not engage. The same applies to the petition clipboards outside the Louvre.

Eating

Kitchens close. Lunch runs roughly noon to half past two and dinner starts at half past seven, and between those windows most places will only serve you a drink. Plan the museum around the meal rather than hoping.

The rule that works everywhere: turn off the boulevard. A restaurant with a laminated menu in six languages and somebody outside encouraging you in is a restaurant on a tourist route, and there is almost always a better and cheaper one two streets behind it. A prix fixe lunch menu is the cheapest way to eat well in this city by a wide margin.

The parts of Paris people describe years later are rarely the ticketed ones. It is the walk back over a bridge after dinner, the bakery two doors from the hotel, the hour in a park chair that was not on any list.

Leave the late afternoons alone and the city fills them.

Or make it a longer trip

These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

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Common questions

Is five days enough for Paris?
It is enough for the two great museums on separate days, the medieval centre, Montmartre and the Marais, at a pace where you sit down for lunch. It is not enough for Versailles as well, and trying to add it is what usually breaks a first trip.
Should I add Versailles?
Only if you drop something. It is a full day: about forty minutes each way on the RER C, then a palace, a park and two smaller châteaux in the grounds. On a first visit of this length the Orsay day is the one it would replace, and that is a poor trade.
Is the Paris Museum Pass worth buying?
It starts paying at around three big sites in two days, which this pace does not reach. It also does not exempt you from booking a Louvre time slot. On five relaxed days, buy tickets individually.
How much walking is this?
Between four and eight kilometres a day, flat except for Montmartre, which is a genuine hill with staircases. The museum days are the tiring ones, and standing on parquet for three hours is harder than the walking.
When is the best time to go?
May to June and September to early October: long days, open terraces, and museums that are busy rather than impossible. August empties the city of Parisians and closes a surprising number of restaurants. Winter is cold, grey and cheap, and the queues nearly vanish.
Can I change it?
Yes. Open it in your account and it becomes an ordinary trip: move a day, swap a museum, add the places you care about, delete whatever does not appeal.