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.
Paris audio guide
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.
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About Paris
Places worth a story
Eiffel Tower
tower located on the Champ de Mars in Paris, France
The Eiffel Tower’s most drawn-out fight happened over its own survival. When the 1889 World’s Fair ended, the plan was to tear it down after twenty years. Gustave Eiffel saved it by making the tower useful: he bolted antennas to the top and argued it was now vital for radio transmission. It worked. In 1909 the demolition was cancelled. The tower went on to serve as a military radio station during the First World War, jamming German communications and helping to intercept messages that led to the capture of Mata Hari. That same iron lattice meant as a temporary exhibit now anchors the Champ de Mars and ranks among the most instantly recognized structures ever built.
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.
Listen on the map → Photo: Benh LIEU SONG ( Flickr ) · CC BY-SA 3.0
Notre-Dame de Paris
cathedral in Paris
The organ here has over eight thousand pipes, and when it roars, the whole building seems to breathe. But Notre-Dame de Paris is just as famous for what happened outside its walls as inside them. For centuries, it was the social center of the city—cooks set up stalls at its doors, actors performed on its steps, and engraved stones laid across the parvis defined the standard measures for the entire kingdom. Then, in April 2019, the world watched as its medieval roof burned for hours, and Paris proved it would not let the cathedral go.
avenue des Champs-Élysées
avenue in Paris, France
Bibliothèque nationale de France
national library of France in Paris
University of Paris
French university (c. 1150–1970)
Institut Polytechnique des Sciences Avancées
French engineering college in aerospace
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.
Listen on the map → Photo: Livioandronico2013 · CC BY-SA 4.0
Père Lachaise Cemetery
cemetery in Paris, France
Conservatoire national des Arts et Métiers
French engineering school founded in 1794
Élysée Palace
official residence of the President of France
Listen on the map → Photo: U.S. Department of State from United States · Public domain
Montmartre
large hill in Paris's northern 18th arrondissement
place de la Concorde
square in the 8th arrondissement of Paris, France
Listen on the map → Photo: Cristian Bortes from Cluj-Napoca, Romania · CC BY 2.0
National Assembly
lower house of the French Parliament under the Fifth Republic
Listen on the map → Photo: CC BY-SA 3.0
île de la Cité
island in the river Seine, Paris, France
Panthéon
mausoleum in Paris for the most distinguished French people
Tuileries Palace
royal and imperial palace in Paris which stood on the right bank of the River Seine
Sacré-Cœur
Roman Catholic church in Paris, France
Sorbonne
historical university and building in Paris, France
Sainte Chapelle
chapel in Paris, in France
Listen on the map → Photo: Didier B ( Sam67fr ) · CC BY-SA 2.5
7th arrondissement of Paris
municipal arrondissement in Île-de-France, France
University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne
French university located at the heart of the Latin Quarter, in Paris
Musée des Arts et Métiers
science and technology museum located in Paris, France
Luxembourg Palace
seat of the French Senate
Listen on the map → Photo: xiquinhosilva from Cacau · CC BY 2.0
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Stories are written by an AI from public map and encyclopaedia data and may contain mistakes.