Behind an anonymous door on rue Antoine Bourdelle there’s a courtyard with four bronzes taller than you are, lined up under the red brick arches of a portico. A fifth figure crouches among the low hedges, bent over something it holds in its hands. This is the garden of the Musée Bourdelle, the studio where the sculptor really worked, and it costs nothing. Montparnasse is built that way: behind the apartment blocks on the boulevard you’ll find two sculptors’ houses, a museum of the Resistance and a limestone quarry full of bones.
There’s one thing you need to know before you book the train, though, because this quarter doesn’t get the exception other ones do: all four sites close on Mondays, Bourdelle, Zadkine, the Musée de la Libération and the Catacombs. Not one of them stays open, and on a Monday in Montparnasse what you’re left with is the cemetery and the street. And there is a closure on right now that weighs more than that: the Musée Zadkine is shut until 19 October 2026 inclusive and reopens on 20 October with a new route through its collections, still free to enter. Until that date the quarter has three sites, not four.
So how much does a full day of museums here actually cost you?
Let’s go!
1. The Musée Bourdelle, and the bill you don’t expect
Zero euros, until you go underground. Admission to the Bourdelle’s permanent collections is free, with no age brackets, no booking and no small print: the museum says so in a single line on its ticket page, and that line comes with no clauses attached.
It’s worth understanding how rare this is, because the rules change from one museum of the same network to the next. Over at the Cognacq-Jay, in the Marais, free admission vanishes the moment a temporary exhibition goes up and you pay for the whole museum; at the Maison de Victor Hugo it’s suspended for months at a time. Not here: you pay separately for the temporary show, but the permanent collection stays free even while that show is running. Four museums in the same city, three different ways of behaving, and the practical lesson is that you can’t copy one museum’s rule onto the one next door.
Antoine Bourdelle worked in this courtyard from 1885 to 1929, the year he died, and the museum has kept the studio, the house and the garden, with the plasters and the bronzes left where they stood. It opens Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00-18:00, and closes on Mondays, on 1 January, 1 May and 25 December. You won’t find the price of the temporary exhibition written anywhere, because it changes from one show to the next: its page sends you each time to the page of the exhibition that’s running, so I’m not going to give you a number that doesn’t exist.
In the inner garden, propped against the wall and half hidden by a branch, there’s a bronze Joan of Arc with a green patina. She stands on a low plinth, holds her lance up in one hand and keeps the other open at her side, in a pleated robe that falls to her feet. Behind her a hollow dark shape opens out and follows her like a shadow. The six works I’d start from inside the museum are in Musée Bourdelle: 6 works to see.
2. The Musée Zadkine, free, with one clause the Bourdelle doesn’t have
Ossip Zadkine lived and worked from 1928 to 1967, the year he died, in a low house with a garden and two studios, at the end of a passage off rue d’Assas. The museum that grew out of it is one of the best hidden places in Paris: from the street you see a passage between two walls that looks like it leads nowhere, and you walk straight past it. Here too admission to the permanent collection is free and needs no booking, under the same rule as the Bourdelle: you pay for the temporary show, you don’t pay for the permanent one, and the price of the show isn’t published. It opens Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00-18:00, with last admission at 17:30, so if you turn up at 17:45 you’re staying outside.
Watch out: the Zadkine’s closing days are not the Bourdelle’s, even though the two museums have the same owner. Its official page says the museum closes on Mondays and on some public holidays, without saying which, plus 1 January, 1 May and 25 December; on 24 and 31 December it closes early, at 17:00. That list of three dates is not the full list of the holidays it stays shut on, and the source publishes no others: if your visit falls inside a long weekend, phone before you cross half the city. The five things to see inside are the ones I picked out in Musée Zadkine: 5 things to see.
3. Montparnasse cemetery, which is also a sculpture museum
The cemetery is free and asks nothing of you, and it’s the thing that’s still there for you on a Monday. From the entrance you see rows of dark granite slabs, polished and flat, broken every so often by a family chapel. One of them, neo-Gothic, has a pointed roof, a pierced rose window and a sharp arch over the door, and looks like a miniature church dropped among the graves. Around them the avenues have real trees and real shade, which is why Parisians walk through here.
I’m not giving you opening hours, and the reason is simple: the city cemeteries of Paris change their closing time with the season, and on the Ville de Paris site the table for this one won’t let you read it from outside. Treat it as a middle-of-the-day visit rather than a late afternoon one, especially now that the low season started on 1 October and the dark comes sooner.
4. La Closerie des Lilas and the boulevard, or the other Montparnasse
There’s a second Montparnasse, laid over the first and barely a century long, and it’s the one made of the cafés where artists met in the first decades of the twentieth century, when the studios moved here from the hill of Montmartre. La Closerie des Lilas still stands on the corner of boulevard du Montparnasse, with two white oval signs on the front, green awnings pulled down over the terrace, a glass canopy above the entrance and a tall hedge keeping the little tables away from the traffic. A little further west, at the Vavin crossroads, you’ll find the Dôme, the Rotonde and the Coupole.
You don’t need to go in here, and I’m not saying it to save you the bill: what’s left of those years is on the façades and the plaques, while inside you’ll find a restaurant like any other, with a wine list worthy of the address. Stop on the pavement long enough to read the signs, then walk on. Montparnasse, after all, is a quarter you can see almost entirely without a ticket, the Catacombs aside: nearly all of its stops end up on the list I put together in Paris for free.
One thing that almost all the older guidebooks get wrong, and that will save you a wasted trip: the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain is no longer in Montparnasse. Jean Nouvel’s glass building on boulevard Raspail, for thirty years the quarter’s piece of contemporary architecture, doesn’t house it any more. The foundation now gives its address as 2 place du Palais-Royal, on the other side of the Seine. If you had it down for this quarter, move it somewhere else before you leave the house.
5. The Musée de la Libération de Paris, and the bunker under the square
What is there twenty metres below place Denfert-Rochereau?
Two different things, dug out of the same limestone quarry, and neither of them shows from the street. On one side of the square is the ossuary of the Catacombs; on the other, under the museum, is Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy’s command post, from which the Paris uprising was directed in August 1944. The two official sources give the same depth, twenty metres, and the two entrances look at each other across the twin pavilions Claude-Nicolas Ledoux built on either side of the barrière d’Enfer.
The museum sits inside one of those two pavilions. The permanent collection is free for everyone and can’t be booked, it opens Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00-18:00, last admission is at 17:30 and the rooms close at 17:45. The price of the temporary exhibitions isn’t published here either, and it varies.
The visit to the command post is the part people miss, because it works in a way no website explains to you in advance: it’s free, it lasts about half an hour and you can only book it in person, at the entrance, on the day itself, with very few places. You won’t find it online and you can’t hold it from home: if you want it, get there early. The only way down is by stairs, so the command post isn’t accessible to anyone with limited mobility, while the permanent collections, the exhibition space and the lecture room are. The museum’s six stops are the ones I lined up in Musée de la Libération: 6 stops.
6. The Catacombs, to keep for last
Does anyone who gets in free at the Catacombs have to book a time slot?
No, and in that they’re an exception across the whole city: free tickets aren’t booked online and give you guaranteed entry with no reservation. At the Tours de Notre-Dame, to take one example, even people entitled to free admission have to bring an e-ticket with a time slot on it. Two monuments in the same city, two opposite rules, and you pay the difference in queuing time if you don’t know about it.
Everyone else pays, and this is the dearest ticket in the quarter and one of the dearest in Paris. The full ticket costs 31 euros and includes the audio guide, the concession costs 25 euros and the rate for ages 8 to 17 is 15 euros. Under 8s go in free, but without the audio guide. Anyone entering free, and any child, can buy the audio guide separately at the desk for 5 euros. They aren’t covered by the Paris Museum Pass, unlike almost everything else in the city.
One detail decides whether the money is well spent, and for you it falls on the right side: the audio guide exists in French, English, Spanish and German. It lasts about an hour, it starts by itself as you walk and it has an audio-described version in French.
You go down 131 steps and climb back up 112, by stairs only, twenty metres underground, because there’s no lift: bear it in mind if your knees are tired or you’re carrying a child. It opens Tuesday to Sunday, 9:45-20:30, with last admissions at 19:30: it’s the only site in the quarter that keeps going into the evening, because the other three all close at 18:00. On public holidays the Catacombs are the most transparent of the lot, and they state which ones they open on: Ascension Thursday, 14 July, 15 August, 1 and 11 November, except when the date falls on a Monday. 1 November 2026 is a Sunday, so you’ll find them open that day, and that’s the detail that saves you a long weekend in autumn. The eight stops along the underground route are the ones I tell you about in Catacombes de Paris: 8 stops.
One detail that raises a smile, and it’s written on the official site: stealing or attempting to steal a bone is prosecuted automatically, under article 225-17 of the French penal code, and costs a year in prison and a 15,000 euro fine. It isn’t folklore, it’s a line of notice to visitors.
Practical information
Figures checked on 2 October 2026 on the official websites of the individual sites. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you leave.
Tickets. The Catacombs ask 31 euros for the full ticket, which includes the audio guide, 25 euros for the concession and 15 euros for ages 8 to 17. Under 8s get in free, and the audio guide is bought separately at the desk for 5 euros, as it is by anyone entering free. The Musée Bourdelle, the Musée Zadkine and the Musée de la Libération ask for no ticket at all for their permanent collections. No published price. None of the three city museums publishes the price of its own temporary exhibition, because it changes from one show to the next: you read it on the page of the exhibition that’s running, or at the desk. Opening hours. Bourdelle, Zadkine and the Musée de la Libération open 10:00-18:00 from Tuesday to Sunday, the Zadkine with last admission at 17:30 and the Musée de la Libération with last admission at 17:30 and the rooms closed at 17:45. The Catacombs open 9:45-20:30 from Tuesday to Sunday, with last admissions at 19:30. Closing days. All four sites close on Mondays, and in this quarter there’s no exception to it. On public holidays they behave in three different ways instead: the Bourdelle and the Musée de la Libération declare only the three annual closures of 1 January, 1 May and 25 December. The Zadkine adds «some public holidays» without saying which. The Catacombs use the same open-ended formula, but at least they list the holidays they stay open on: Ascension Thursday, 14 July, 15 August, 1 and 11 November, except when the date falls on a Monday. The Zadkine closes early, at 17:00, on 24 and 31 December. Free admission. The permanent collections of the Musée Bourdelle, the Musée Zadkine and the Musée de la Libération are free for everyone, with no age brackets and no booking. At the Musée de la Libération the visit to the command post is free as well, though you can only book it in person on the day itself. Montparnasse cemetery is free to enter. None of the four sites offers free admission on the first Sunday of the month, because three of them never ask for a ticket and the Catacombs don’t provide for it: if you were counting on that, here you don’t need it. Accessibility. At the Musée de la Libération the permanent collections, the exhibition space and the lecture room are accessible to people with reduced mobility, while the command post isn’t, because you can only reach it by stairs. There’s no lift at the Catacombs: you go down 131 steps and climb back up 112. Getting there. Montparnasse-Bienvenüe on lines 4, 6, 12 and 13 and Falguière on line 12 serve the Musée Bourdelle. Notre-Dame-des-Champs on line 12, Vavin on line 4 and Port-Royal on the RER B serve the Musée Zadkine. Denfert-Rochereau on lines 4 and 6 and on the RER B serves the Catacombs and the Musée de la Libération together, which stand on the same square a hundred metres from each other. The line that holds the quarter together is line 4, which runs from Montparnasse-Bienvenüe down to Denfert-Rochereau by way of Vavin. How long it takes. A morning is enough for the Bourdelle and the Zadkine, which are a quarter of an hour apart on foot. Add the Musée de la Libération and the Catacombs and you reach a full day, and if you want the cemetery and a walk along the boulevard as well, count on two hours more.
How to line them up
The order isn’t a preference, the Catacombs ticket office decides it. Their time slot has a fixed number of places, it opens seven days ahead and, once you’ve chosen it, it fixes the time of everything else that day: so you book that one first and build the rest backwards, not the other way round.
Out of that comes a single route. The three free museums go in the morning and the early afternoon, because they all close at 18:00; the Catacombs go last, because they’re the only ones open until 20:30. Bourdelle and Zadkine in the morning, the Musée de la Libération straight after lunch at Denfert-Rochereau, and the descent underground in the late afternoon, a hundred metres from the door you’ve just come out of. Tuesday is the best day to slot Montparnasse into a longer trip, because it’s the day when the Musée Delacroix closes in Saint-Germain and the Grande Galerie de l’Évolution closes in the Latin Quarter. Here, all four sites are open instead.
With three days to spend, Montparnasse goes where I put it in What to see in Paris in 3 days. From Vavin head north, cross the Jardin du Luxembourg and in twenty minutes you reach Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where the constraint isn’t a day but an hour; turn east instead and you’re in the Latin Quarter, and beyond the river the Marais begins.
Photographs: the garden of the Musée Bourdelle by Arthur_Crbz, CC BY-SA 3.0, from Wikimedia Commons; Joan of Arc in the garden of the Musée Bourdelle by Bycro, CC0; Montparnasse cemetery by Polymagou, CC BY-SA 4.0; La Closerie des Lilas by Celette, CC BY-SA 4.0.
