When you say “Paris Opera”, you’re probably picturing this gilded palace, with the two winged statues glittering on the roof. But since 1994, after the Opéra Bastille opened, the institution that brings opera and ballet together has been called the “Opéra national de Paris” and runs two theatres. This one has carried the official name of Palais Garnier ever since, after the architect who designed it.
You can visit it by day too, without a ticket for a performance: the self-guided route takes you past the lobby and into the Grand Foyer and the Bibliothèque-musée, among mirrors, gilding and a painted ceiling.
How can a real lake lie sleeping under a theatre made for ballet and opera?
Let’s go!
1. An assassination attempt in the street, and a competition won by a complete unknown
What drives an emperor to commission an entirely new theatre?
On 14 January 1858, outside the old opera house on rue Le Peletier, a group of Italian republicans led by Felice Orsini threw several bombs at the carriage of Napoleon III: eight dead, about 142 wounded, and the emperor unhurt by a whisker. The answer was a piece of town planning: a new theatre on a broad avenue that could be kept under watch, far from the alleys where an attacker could hide.
The competition opened soon afterwards and 171 designs came in. On 30 May 1861 it was won by a candidate nobody knew: Charles Garnier, who had taken the Premier Grand Prix de Rome in 1848 but had no major building to his name, and who had submitted his design anonymously, under the motto “J’aspire à beaucoup, j’attends peu”. Work began in 1861, Haussmann laid the foundation stone on 5 May 1862, and a first façade was shown to the public on 15 August 1867, during the Universal Exhibition, while the rest of the building was still a building site. The official inauguration came only on 5 January 1875. The budget, set at 29 million gold francs and then cut to 15, ended up costing 36 by the time it was finished. Napoleon III, who had wanted it in order to escape assassins, died in exile in January 1873: he never saw his theatre finished.
For the decoration Garnier chose fourteen painters, the mosaicists and 73 sculptors himself, among them Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. His group La Danse, with its nude and unselfconscious figures, scandalised Parisians so much that someone threw an inkwell at it on the night of 26 to 27 August 1869. Today the original is kept in the Musée d’Orsay, sheltered from pollution; on the façade you’ll find a copy.
2. The Grand Staircase, before you even reach the auditorium
Your self-guided ticket takes you first up the Grand Staircase, and that alone is a spectacle: steps of white Seravezza marble, curved from concave to convex (only one, along the whole flight, is straight), an onyx balustrade on a base of Swedish green marble and 128 balusters in rosso antico marble. At the foot of the stairs you’ll find two bronze torchère figures by Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, designed to carry gas lights at first and electric ones later.
Garnier did not design it only to get the audience upstairs: the staircase, with its broad flights and the balconies that look out over several levels, and the Italian-style auditorium are both built on purpose so that you see and are seen. The flights that follow take you up to the boxes and balconies around the horseshoe-shaped auditorium, 1,979 seats on five tiers.
3. The Grand Foyer, the Versailles of opera lovers
From the staircase you enter the Grand Foyer, conceived as a meeting place for the audience during the intervals, whatever seat they had in the auditorium. Garnier built it with an eye on the galleries of French châteaux and palaces, from Fontainebleau to the Galerie d’Apollon in the Louvre, all the way to the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles: mirrors alternating with windows that open onto the streets around multiply the light and stretch the space, a trick that still works today, ticket in hand.
The ceiling, painted by Paul Baudry, tells the history of music in pictures. If you’ve ever stood in the foyer of any opera house, this one will show you the difference: the promenoir here is as big as the nave of a church, gilded from floor to ceiling.
4. The ceiling Chagall painted, and the one left underneath
What became of the ceiling Garnier had painted in the nineteenth century?
It hasn’t been removed: it’s still there. The original ceiling of the auditorium, Les Muses et les Heures du jour et de la nuit, was painted by Jules-Eugène Lenepveu directly onto twenty-four copper panels assembled into a dome, for fire-safety reasons, and was restored twice in the first half of the twentieth century.
The Minister of Culture André Malraux commissioned a new ceiling from Marc Chagall, which was inaugurated in 1964. Chagall first prepared sketches and models, then a team of painter-decorators, among them Roland Bierge, transferred the design onto canvases mounted on a removable polyester structure.
Here’s the point: Chagall’s work is glued onto a structure that can be taken apart, and it hides Lenepveu’s painting without having erased it. The door stays open, at least in theory, to a day when someone decides to uncover it again. In the meantime, you can see a model of Lenepveu’s ceiling in the very Bibliothèque-musée you’re about to visit, a few metres from where the real original is.
5. The chandelier, the legend and what really fell
The great chandelier that hangs in the middle of the auditorium is gilded bronze, with a myriad of cut crystals: the frame alone is five metres high and four wide, and with its steel cables it reaches eight metres in height, for a weight of 6.5 tonnes. Garnier designed it himself, the ornamentalist Jules Corboz sculpted it, and it was installed in 1874 with 340 gas burners; from 1881 it was partly electrified, with 320 bulbs mostly set in opaline globes.
The legend you may know says that the chandelier fell on the audience during a performance of Gounod’s Faust, on the evening of 20 May 1896. It didn’t, and the reality is almost more disturbing than the legend. What fell was one of the four counterweights that hold the chandelier up, 750 kilos, during a performance of a now-forgotten opera, Hellé by Étienne-Joseph Floquet, not Faust. The counterweight smashed through the ceiling and then the floor of the fifth-tier boxes, which were empty, and landed on seats 11 and 13 of the fourth-tier boxes, where a spectator, Claudine Chomeil, was sitting; she died on the spot. The chandelier itself didn’t move an inch. Many others were injured in the crush that followed.
That real accident inspired Gaston Leroux for one of the most famous episodes of his novel The Phantom of the Opera, published in 1910: there, it is the phantom himself who brings the chandelier down.
6. The lake that isn’t a legend
Is there really a lake under the Paris Opéra?
Yes, but not a lake in the sense you picture when you read the novel. When they dug the foundations, around 1861, Garnier’s workmen hit the water table, fed by the Seine: the ground was so unstable that it threatened the whole building. Garnier solved the problem by building an enormous concrete containment basin.
Once construction was over, that basin became a fire-fighting water reserve, and that is where the legend began: even today, according to local news reports, the divers of the Paris fire brigade train there regularly, climbing down a narrow ladder that very few visitors ever see. There are no gondolas and no phantom in a dinner jacket, but the water, the darkness and the echo under the stage were enough for Gaston Leroux to build the Phantom’s lair on top of them, and for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, after him, to turn it into a universal image.
Practical information
Figures checked on 8 October 2026 on the official website operadeparis.fr. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you leave, especially the calendar of closures.
Tickets. The self-guided visit costs 15 euros for adults who live in, or are citizens of, a country of the European Union or the European Economic Area, and 25 euros for everyone else. The reduced rate, for young people aged 13 to 25, costs 10 euros (France/EEA) or 20 euros (outside France/EEA). Opéra subscribers pay 10 euros. What it includes. The ticket gives access to the public spaces: the Rotonde des Abonnés, the Grand Staircase, the Avant-Foyer and the Grand Foyer, the Moon and Sun salons, the Rotonde du Glacier and the Bibliothèque-musée de l’Opéra, as well as the temporary exhibitions of the moment. The auditorium can be visited only when it isn’t taken up by rehearsals or performances, and no ticket guarantees access to it. Opening hours. It opens every day 10:00-17:00, 10:00-18:00 in the summer period, apart from occasional closures. Last admission is an hour before closing, and the visiting areas are cleared 15 minutes before. Closures. The Palais Garnier stages almost 200 performances a year: rehearsals and afternoon performances close the auditorium without warning, and on some days the whole building stays closed to self-guided visits. Check the calendar of occasional closures on the official website before you book. Free admission. Entry is free for children aged 12 and under, for people with disabilities (with one companion), for the unemployed and people receiving social support in France (with proof), and for students of architecture, of the École du Louvre or of applied-arts schools. The pass. The Palais Garnier is not covered by the Paris Museum Pass: it’s a working theatre, not a national museum, and the visit is always paid for separately. Getting there. The address is place de l’Opéra, 75009 Paris. The metro stop is Opéra, on lines 3, 7 and 8; the RER A stops at Auber, a short walk away. How long it takes. A self-guided visit lasts between an hour and an hour and a half.
Where to go from here
A ten-minute walk away, in the heart of the same quarter, the Musée Gustave Moreau is the house the painter turned into a museum himself: a Palais Garnier ticket issued in the last fifteen days saves you money there too.
Photographs: west façade by Peter Menzel (CC BY-SA 2.0); Grand Staircase by Benh Lieu Song (CC BY-SA 3.0); Grand Foyer by Elterrien (CC BY-SA 4.0); the Harmony group by Charles Gumery, photograph by Marie-Lan Nguyen (public domain), from Wikimedia Commons.
