On the parvis of Notre-Dame the stone has gone pale again, almost yellow in the afternoon sun, and from down there you can read the west front line by line. First the three carved portals, then the stone kings in the gallery above them, then the rose window, then the two flat-topped square towers at the top. This is the front that came out of the restoration, and the difference from the photographs of ten years ago is all in the colour: where the stone was grey with smog, it is pale now.
On an island you can walk across in a few minutes you’ll find a Gothic cathedral, the royal chapel with its fifteen thirteenth-century windows, the palace of the kings turned into a prison, and a memorial almost no visitor ever finds. Then a bridge, and the second island, which is a neighbourhood of houses and nothing more.
The good thing about this piece of the city is that the four main sites, the cathedral, the towers, the Sainte-Chapelle and the Conciergerie, have no weekly closing day, which is very rare in Paris: the island holds up even on a Monday, when the Marais and Montparnasse are almost entirely shut. What constrains you here is the clock, not the calendar, because from 1 October the Sainte-Chapelle closes at 17:00 and the towers circuit at 17:30, and in winter the island goes dark before the rest of the city.
Which of these stops do you have to book before you leave home, because on the spot they won’t sell a ticket to anyone?
Let’s go!
The island works all week, but not at every hour
Start with the thing that makes your trip easier: Notre-Dame, the towers, the Sainte-Chapelle and the Conciergerie all open seven days a week. If you have a Monday to fill in Paris, this is where you spend it.
There are only two weekly constraints, and both are minor. On the first Monday of the month the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation closes, the only site on the island that does. On Thursday the cathedral stays open later, at least according to the hours in circulation, so that’s the day the round takes longest.
Then there’s the season, and in October you feel it straight away. From 1 October to 31 March the Sainte-Chapelle opens 9:00-17:00 instead of closing at 19:00, and the Tours de Notre-Dame go from 9:00-23:00 to 9:00-17:30: in summer you can climb the towers after dinner, in winter you need to be in the queue in the early afternoon. The Conciergerie is the only one that never changes, 9:30-18:00 all year round.
As for the free first Sunday of the month, don’t trust the general rule, because here every site has its own. The Conciergerie is free on the first Sunday only in January, February, March and November; the Tours de Notre-Dame and the Sainte-Chapelle add December to those four. So the sum is this: in October the first Sunday is free at none of the three, which means you pay on 4 October 2026 like on any other day. The two dates worth writing down are 1 November, when all three let you in for nothing, and 6 December, when the two that include that month do.
One last thing that costs you dear if you discover it on the spot: there is a combined Sainte-Chapelle plus Conciergerie ticket, 23 euros for citizens and residents of the European Economic Area and 30 for everybody else, and it is sold only on the Sainte-Chapelle site. If you start booking from the Conciergerie page you won’t find it, and you end up buying two separate tickets.
1. Notre-Dame, the cathedral you visit without a ticket
Do you pay to get into Notre-Dame, now that it has reopened?
You don’t. The cathedral is open for worship and for visits free of charge, with no ticket on sale, and booking a time slot is free and optional: it saves you the queue, it doesn’t get you in. Here, though, I owe you a word about the sources, because you’d rather know. The cathedral’s official site can’t be read by an automated system and turns away every request, and the diocese doesn’t publish its hours. The only figures in circulation are Monday to Friday 7:50-19:00, with Thursday until 22:00, and 8:15-19:30 at the weekend: they come from tourist portals and not from an official page. Treat them as an order of magnitude rather than a guaranteed timetable, and check the booking page the day before.
Inside, the relic many people come looking for is the crown of thorns, back in the cathedral since it reopened in December 2024 and shown to the faithful on Friday. On this too the cathedral site won’t let me confirm the day, so allow for it. The Trésor is the only part you pay for, 12 euros, and you pay on the spot only: that figure as well, for the same reason, doesn’t come from an official page.
What exactly happened in those hours of April 2019, what really burned and how the forest of beams was rebuilt, I’ve told in Notre-Dame de Paris: 8 things to know about the fire and the rebirth.
2. The Tours de Notre-Dame, the one stop you must book
Here’s the stop you book from home, and it’s also the newest thing on the island: the towers circuit reopened on 20 September 2025, and it isn’t the round that existed before the fire but a different route. The full ticket costs 16 euros.
The rule you need to know before all the others is this: not a single ticket is sold on site. You get in only with an electronic ticket and a booked time slot, and that holds for people entitled to free entry and for people with a Paris Museum Pass in their pocket. Free tickets have a quota for each slot, so if your category has run out of places in that half hour, only paid tickets are left for it. Attention: if you turn up without a booking you don’t get in, and there’s no desk to argue with.
There are then four things the site states that change the shape of your day. Groups are not admitted and speaking rights are not granted, which means a guide can’t talk you through the circuit and an agency can’t buy your ticket for you: up to seven people climbing together is fine, each with their own ticket. There’s no cloakroom and no left luggage, so leave the suitcase at the hotel. There’s no toilet and no drinking water along the route, while a water bottle is allowed and worth bringing. And in bad weather parts of the circuit close with no refund: only when the whole circuit closes are online tickets refunded automatically.
As for your legs, test yourself before you book. It’s 424 steps with no lift, the towers stand 69 metres high, and in several stretches the passages are 45 centimetres wide and low enough that you have to bend. The French press puts the round at 45-50 minutes. At the ticket desk ask for the free downloadable guide, which is called le compagnon des Tours.
Compare it with the other great Paris descent and you’ll see how unusual these rules are: at the Catacombes de Paris free tickets can’t be booked at all, and that’s exactly why they guarantee you entry. On the towers it’s the other way round, and free entry without a booking simply doesn’t exist.
3. The Sainte-Chapelle, and the scaffolding nobody warns you about
The upper chapel is a box of glass inside a shell of stone, and it’s as impressive as anything you can see in Europe. The official numbers tell you why: 1113 scenes spread over fifteen thirteenth-century windows, with two thirds of the glass medieval, meaning original. The story starts with Genesis on the north side and ends to the west with the rose window of the Apocalypse; the palette comes down to red, blue, two greens, two purples, a yellow and a few translucent pieces, and it’s this poverty of colour that gives the whole thing its unity. In the last window of the south flank, look for Louis IX, the king who had it built: his portrait is there.
Now the part you need to know before you buy the ticket. The Sainte-Chapelle is a building site, and has been for years. Since the start of 2025 the window of Ezekiel, between the apse and the south front, has been under restoration, and working on it has meant scaffolding inside the upper chapel as well as outside. The site publishes no finishing date, and the next announced job is on the south front. The twenty-year programme has already redone five of the seven bays of the apse, the north front, the western rose window and the two porches of the west front. In plain terms: one of the fifteen windows may be covered when you go, nobody says which or for how long, and if you arrive expecting fifteen intact windows you’ll come away disappointed for the wrong reason.
The full ticket costs 16 euros for citizens and residents of the European Economic Area and 22 euros for everybody else, and the chapel opens 9:00-17:00 from 1 October to 31 March and 9:00-19:00 from 1 April to 30 September, with last admission half an hour before. Entry is free for under-18s, for European Union citizens between 18 and 25 and for anyone legally resident in France in that age bracket, for disabled visitors with one companion, and for jobseekers with a certificate less than six months old. The windows one by one, in the order you should read them, are in Sainte-Chapelle: the magnificent stained glass of Saint Louis’s shrine.
4. The Conciergerie, and the date that doesn’t add up
From the Pont au Change you see it for what it was before it became a prison. The round towers have conical slate roofs, and the long front on the quai de l’Horloge is the flank of the palace the kings of France lived in until the fourteenth century. Inside, what waits for you is the salle des gens d’armes, with its four aisles on piers, the medieval kitchens, and the revolutionary part, with Marie Antoinette’s cell.
The ticket costs 13 euros and the monument opens 9:30-18:00 all year round, with last admission at 17:30. One thing to know if the augmented-reality reconstruction appeals to you: the HistoPad is handed out only until 16:15, so going in at 17:00 means visiting without it. Free entry covers under-18s, EU citizens aged 18 to 25 and legal residents in France, disabled visitors and their companion, jobseekers and holders of the pass éducation. There are also partnership rates if you arrive with a Vedettes de Paris ticket or an SNCF ticket less than five days old. The monument is closed on 1 May and 25 December, while on 1 January it is open, unlike almost everything else.
Then there’s a detail I can’t settle for you, because it can’t be settled from outside. The official page announces an early closing at 14:00 for «Wednesday 8 October», and 8 October 2026 is a Thursday: the Wednesday of that week is the 7th. Either the day is wrong or the date is, and since you’re the one turning up at the door, the honest thing is to tell you the notice is ambiguous and that on those two days you’d do well to check again that same morning. The eight rooms I’d start from are lined up in Conciergerie: 8 rooms of the kings’ palace that became a prison.
5. The Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation, on the tip of the island
Behind the apse of Notre-Dame, in the square de l’Île-de-France, at 7 quai de l’Archevêché, you go down below the level of the garden and into the memorial to the deported, inaugurated by de Gaulle in 1962 to a design by Georges-Henri Pingusson. It’s the least visited monument on the island and the hardest to find, because from the street you see almost nothing. Everything is underneath, and it’s the architecture itself, with its narrow squeezes and its measured light, that does the work objects on display do elsewhere.
Entry is free. The hours in circulation give guided visits by appointment Monday to Friday 9:30-15:00 and free visiting 15:00-18:00, while on Saturday, on Sunday and in July and August free visiting covers the whole 9:30-18:00. These figures come from the tourist office portal and not from the body that runs the memorial, which doesn’t publish them: take them with care. The rule that is certain, on the other hand, and that will waste your journey: the memorial closes on the first Monday of the month and on 1 May, and it’s the only site on the island with a fixed closing day.
What you can’t visit today: the crypte archéologique
Under the parvis of Notre-Dame there’s a museum showing the Roman, medieval and nineteenth-century walls found while digging the square. It is closed. The Ville de Paris states that it is shut to the public for preventive conservation work and maintenance of the remains, and sends visitors to the Musée Carnavalet, in the Marais.
Attention: the notice runs on the page from 29 June 2026 to 28 February 2027, and that is not an announced reopening date: it’s the window during which the museum keeps the sign up. Nobody has published the day it will open again. I’m telling you because guided tours of the island are still being sold online promising «entry to the archaeological crypt under the parvis», and that is a visit which today doesn’t exist. If it’s a loss, the consolation is a ten-minute walk away, in one of the nine stops of What to see in the Marais.
6. The Île Saint-Louis, the island with nothing to visit
What’s the point of crossing a bridge to an island without a single museum?
Cross the pont Saint-Louis and the noise drops all at once. The second island is a grid of straight streets built almost entirely in the seventeenth century, and you can read that in the fronts: same height, same stone, same iron balconies, a continuity you’ll hardly find anywhere else in Paris. It has no museums and no tickets, and that’s the whole point.
Do this: stop on the pont Saint-Louis before you cross it and look back, because from there you can see the apse of the cathedral with its flying buttresses, the part you can’t make sense of from the parvis. Then walk the tree-lined quays on the north side, look into the open doorways of the houses and go down to the lower riverside, where the traffic doesn’t reach. The island church is Saint-Louis-en-l’Île: its hours are set by the Masses and I haven’t found them published anywhere, so if you find it open, go in.
It’s the right stop to end the day on, because it asks nothing of you and can’t be booked. For everything in Paris that costs nothing, and for what is worth paying for instead, the full reckoning is in Paris for free.
Practical information
Figures checked on 2 October 2026 on the official sites of the individual venues. Prices and hours change: check again before you leave.
Tickets. The Sainte-Chapelle costs 16 euros for citizens and residents of the European Economic Area and 22 euros for everybody else, and the ticket covers the lower chapel and the upper chapel. The Conciergerie asks 13 euros and covers the whole monument, HistoPad included. The Tours de Notre-Dame cost 16 euros for the climb alone. The combined Sainte-Chapelle plus Conciergerie ticket costs 23 euros in the first case and 30 in the second, and you buy it only on the Sainte-Chapelle site. Without an official price. The cathedral sells no tickets and entry is free; the Trésor costs 12 euros on the spot, but the cathedral site turns away automated requests and that figure, like the cathedral’s hours, circulates only on tourist portals. Hours. The Sainte-Chapelle opens 9:00-17:00 from 1 October to 31 March and 9:00-19:00 from 1 April to 30 September, with last admission thirty minutes before. The Conciergerie opens 9:30-18:00 all year round, with last admission at 17:30 and the HistoPad until 16:15. The Tours de Notre-Dame open 9:00-17:30 from 1 October to 31 March and 9:00-23:00 from 1 April to 30 September, with last entry an hour before closing. Closures. None of the four main venues closes on a day of the week. The Sainte-Chapelle and the towers are closed on 1 January, 1 May and 25 December; the Conciergerie closes on 1 May and 25 December and stays open on 1 January. The Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation closes on the first Monday of the month and on 1 May. The crypte archéologique is closed with no published reopening date. Bookings. At the Tours de Notre-Dame you get in only with an electronic ticket and a booked slot, even if you are entitled to free entry and even if you hold the Paris Museum Pass; groups are not admitted. At the cathedral booking a slot is free and optional. Free entry. The cathedral is free for everyone, and so is the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation. At the Sainte-Chapelle, the Conciergerie and the towers, entry is free for under-18s, for European Union citizens between 18 and 25 and for anyone legally resident in France in that age bracket, for disabled visitors with one companion and for jobseekers. The first Sunday of the month is free at the Conciergerie only in January, February, March and November, and at the towers and the Sainte-Chapelle in those same months plus December. Paris Museum Pass. The pass covers the Sainte-Chapelle, the Conciergerie and the towers circuit, but at the towers you still need the booked slot. What it actually covers and what stays outside it is in Paris Museum Pass. Getting there. Cité on line 4 is the island’s own stop, and it’s the one that leaves you closest to the Sainte-Chapelle. Châtelet on lines 1, 4, 7, 11 and 14 is the handiest hub from the north. Saint-Michel on line 4, with the RER B and the RER C, serves the rive gauche side. Pont-Marie on line 7 is the stop for the Île Saint-Louis. How long it takes. Half a day is enough for the Sainte-Chapelle, the cathedral and the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation, which stand a few minutes’ walk from one another. Add two hours for the Conciergerie and an hour and a half for the towers, climb, descent and waiting for your slot included, and the day is full. The Île Saint-Louis is added as a walk, with no queues and no hours to keep.
In what order to do them
Begin with the booking rather than the map: you fix the towers slot and build the rest around it. In winter take it early, because after 17:30 it’s over; in summer leave it to the end, because it’s the one thing on the island that keeps you out until 23:00, and the light from up there at that hour repays the 424 steps on its own.
The rest runs from west to east. Sainte-Chapelle as it opens, when the upper chapel is still empty and the blue of the windows really shows. Conciergerie straight afterwards, because it’s in the same block and with the combined ticket you’ve already paid for it. Then the cathedral in the middle of the day, the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation at the end, and the bridge to the Île Saint-Louis when you’ve had enough of tickets. If this is the central day of a short trip, it slots into the route of What to see in Paris in 3 days.
Photographs: west front of Notre-Dame by Wyslijp16, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons; Sainte-Chapelle by Chabe01, CC BY-SA 4.0; Conciergerie by IlonaThoumazet, CC BY-SA 4.0; Île Saint-Louis by DiscoA340, CC BY-SA 4.0.
