At the end of the nineteenth century, Paris tore down half of itself to build what it is today. Baron Haussmann levelled the medieval streets, the crowded tenements, the whole tangled old city, and replaced them with the boulevards you can trace across the map. Not for beauty, at first—for control. Wide, straight avenues are hard to barricade, and armies move fast along them. The city had risen against the crown too many times. So the state cut it open with clean, straight lines, and then discovered that those lines made the city feel, for the first time, like one thing. That is Paris: the first city deliberately rebuilt so you could see it all at once.
Audio guide Paris
Tella is a free audio guide for any place on Earth. Here are 30 places in Paris worth a story. Open one on the map and hear it read aloud in English, or take the Android app on a walk and let it narrate whatever you pass.
About Paris
Places worth a story
Eiffel Tower
tower located on the Champ de Mars in Paris, France
Gustave Eiffel only had a permit for the tower to stand for twenty years. What saved it was radio — by 1909 it was carrying wireless signals too valuable to lose, and the tower stayed. Its iron skeleton was assembled from over eighteen thousand separately numbered pieces, put together by a crew of just a few hundred men in a little over two years. During its construction it became the tallest human-made structure in the world, a title it held for forty-one years.
Louvre Museum
art and archeology museum in Paris, France
Most visitors to the Louvre pass through the grand Pyramid entrance without realizing they’re walking over the remnants of a twelfth-century fortress. That’s where the palace began: a defensive keep built by King Philip II in 1190 to guard the Seine. As Paris expanded, the fortress lost its purpose and became a royal residence, then the world’s first truly public art museum after the Revolution in 1793. Today it holds over half a million works, but the most ironic resident might be the Mona Lisa — a rather small painting behind bulletproof glass, dwarfed by the very palace she made famous. The building itself has outlived every king who commissioned it.
Notre-Dame de Paris
cathedral in Paris
A novel saved Notre-Dame de Paris. After the Revolution stripped and smashed much of its imagery, the cathedral sat neglected, until Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre-Dame came out in 1831 and turned the building into a national cause. The restoration that followed, led by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, gave it the gallery of chimeras and a new spire. Viollet-le-Duc also slipped himself into the sculpture: one of the copper apostles around the spire's base, Saint Thomas, wears his face and gazes up at his own work. In 2019 fire brought that spire down. The apostles survived because they had been lifted off for restoration days before.
Photo: Ali Sabbagh · CC0
avenue des Champs-Élysées
avenue in Paris, France
Avenue des Champs-Élysées is where France measures its power and its grief. The Tour de France has finished here every year since 1975, but the avenue wasn’t built for bicycles. André Le Nôtre laid it out in 1667 as an extension of the Tuileries gardens, a grand axis meant to frame the royal gaze. By the nineteenth century it had become the most fashionable promenade in Europe, and in 1940 German troops marched down it in a parade meant to humiliate a defeated capital. Four years later, French and American soldiers took it back in the opposite direction. Today the avenue is a stage for national celebration — Bastille Day, the finish of the Tour, the final sprint of the Paris Marathon.
Photo: Josh Hallett · CC BY-SA 2.0
Bibliothèque nationale de France
national library of France in Paris
Institut Polytechnique des Sciences Avancées
French engineering college in aerospace
Photo: Marieforchance · CC0
Venus de Milo
ancient Greek marble statue of a woman
The Venus de Milo arrived at the Louvre in 1821 with a twenty-year-old mystery already attached to her: no one could agree on what her arms had been doing. Some claimed she held an apple, a mirror, or a spindle; others insisted one hand rested on a raised knee. The arguments mattered because France had just lost the Medici Venus to Italy and needed this statue to be a masterpiece. The missing arms, whatever they were, only made her harder to categorise — and easier to mythologise. So the Louvre stopped asking. It displayed her as a pure form, complete without a gesture, and modern audiences agreed. Rodin called her "the embodiment of grace," and Dali painted her with drawers. Her fame now rests on the very absence that once confused everyone.
Conservatoire national des Arts et Métiers
French engineering school founded in 1794
Photo: Mbzt · CC BY 3.0
Élysée Palace
official residence of the President of France
Photo: U.S. Department of State from United States · Public domain
Montmartre
large hill in Paris's northern 18th arrondissement
Here’s the thing about Montmartre: when Paris annexed it in 1860, the village fought back so hard that for years afterward locals called themselves not Parisians but *Montmartrois*. The hill had been its own world—wine presses, windmills, gypsum quarries—and it never quite surrendered. The Sacré-Cœur basilica that crowns it today was built partly as penance after the Paris Commune, which began here in 1871 when the army tried to seize cannons from the hilltop. The rebels won that morning, and for two months Montmartre was the spark of a revolutionary Paris. The basilica took forty years to finish, and it still divides opinion: a monument to atonement sitting on the hill where the uprising started.
Photo: Navin75 · CC BY-SA 2.0
place de la Concorde
square in the 8th arrondissement of Paris, France
The guillotine that stood here claimed over twelve hundred lives in under three years. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were both executed on this square, then called Place de la Révolution, along with Robespierre himself — the man most responsible for the Terror. It took its current name, Concorde, in 1795 as a gesture of reconciliation. Today the square is anchored by the Luxor Obelisk, a three-thousand-year-old Egyptian monument gifted to France in the 1830s, and remains the largest square in Paris.
Photo: Cristian Bortes from Cluj-Napoca, Romania · CC BY 2.0
Sacré-Cœur
Roman Catholic church in Paris, France
From the top of the butte, you can see all of Paris — but the basilica itself was built to make a point. Sacré-Cœur went up after France's crushing defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the chaos of the Paris Commune. Conservative Catholics saw both as punishment for national sin, and this hilltop church was their answer: a vow, a penance, a monument to moral order. Construction began in 1875 and took nearly forty years. The architect, Paul Abadie, designed it in a Romano-Byzantine style that looks like nothing else in Paris — all domes and pale stone from Château-Landon, which whitens with rain instead of darkening. Inside, the apse mosaic of Christ is among the largest in the world. And for all the controversy around its origins, Sacré-Cœur now holds the city's only perpetual eucharistic adoration, with prayers continuing nonstop since 1885.
Photo: Tonchino · CC BY-SA 3.0
Tuileries Palace
royal and imperial palace in Paris which stood on the right bank of the River Seine
Sainte Chapelle
chapel in Paris, in France
King Louis IX paid around 135,000 livres for the Crown of Thorns, roughly three times what it then cost to build the Sainte-Chapelle around it. He bought the relic from the Latin emperor of Constantinople, who had pawned it to Venetian bankers. Then, between 1238 and 1248, he raised this chapel inside his own palace on the Île de la Cité, designed as a walk-in reliquary to hold it. The upper chapel is almost all glass, and its windows are still among the largest collections of original thirteenth-century stained glass anywhere. The Crown itself left during the Revolution and is now kept at Notre-Dame.
7th arrondissement of Paris
municipal arrondissement in Île-de-France, France
Photo: Getfunky · CC BY 2.0
University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne
French university located at the heart of the Latin Quarter, in Paris
The Sorbonne’s medieval classrooms once rang with debates so fierce the king himself stepped in—and that’s the thread running straight through to the university you can visit today. When the old University of Paris fractured in 1971, Pantheon-Sorbonne kept the historic Latin Quarter buildings and the name that had meant scholarship since 1257. It specializes in law, economics, philosophy, and the humanities, carrying on the tradition of training France’s civil servants and thinkers. The winding staircases and stone courtyards still echo with nine centuries of argument and ambition.
Musée des Arts et Métiers
science and technology museum located in Paris, France
Stories are written by an AI from public map and encyclopaedia data and may contain mistakes.