What to do in one full day in Paris

Short on time? On a whistle stop tour or Europe? Or visiting on a business trip? Here’s my ultimate guide to have a mind blowing and jam packed one full day in Paris. My qualifications? I used to be a tour guide that regularly took people to Paris on multi-country tours through Europe, and told them how to best spend their one full day there.

I’ve provided two itineraries:

• Itinerary 1, which allows for 3.5 hours to explore the Louvre and Musee D’Orsay (the classic itinerary).
• Itinerary 2, which instead heads further east to see the Ile De La City, Notre Dame and the Latin Quarter (the alternative itinerary for people who aren’t so into art museums)

If you want, you could merge the two to allow for one of the museums and the rest of that time in the Ile De La Cite area. This option would work particularly well if you visit Paris on a Monday (Musee D’Orsay closed) or Tuesday (Louvre closed).

Both itineraries use public transport so are friendly to all budgets.

Warning – these itineraries are not for the faint hearted – they will require good walking shoes, ambition, and lots of space on your camera for photos!

Itinerary 1:

• Get off the metro at Place De La Concorde (‘Concorde’ station) at 8am and walk down the Rue Rivoli to find some breakfast. If you’re feeling fancy you could dine at Angelina’s – it’s best to prebook to skip the queues. If you fancy something cheap, have a crepe from a hole in the wall crepe place and enjoy it in the Jardin de Tuileries (Crepes in Paris are great!).

• Walk to the Louvre at 9am for opening time, using a pre-purchased skip the line ticket to skip the queues. Spend 1.5hrs there. Leave at 10.30.

• Walk across the bridge (either Pont Royal or Pont du Carrousel) to the southern side of the Seine to visit Musee D’Orsay. Get there by 10.45am. Use a pre-booked skip the line ticket to get in past the queues. Spend 2 hours there. Leave at 12.45pm.

• Walk half an hour via a stroll along the Seine to Rue Cler. Get to Rue Cler at 1.15pm. Peruse the stalls and grab a picnic lunch for the Champ De Mars or eat along Rue Cler if you prefer.

• Walk ten minutes to Champ De Mars to take in the Eiffel Tower and have a picnic, unless you’ve already eaten along Rue Cler.

Your route so far this day will have looked like the map below:

• Leave the Eiffel Tower area by 3.30pm (you can leave earlier if you wish)

• Get the Bus No.30 to Pigalle and get off at Blanche. The ride will take approximately 40 minutes. By getting the bus No. 30, you will be able to get a close-up view of the Arc Di Triomphe and see the top of the Champs Elysees out the window.

The purple line shown below is the route your bus will take:

• Get off the bus at Blanche and have a photo stop outside the Moulin Rouge.

• Wander the streets of Montmartre past the Wall of Love for a photo stop as you wind up the hill. Your destination is the steps / grassed area in front of the Sacre Couer church but you’re in no rush. You don’t need to get there til 6pm.

• Hang out at the Sacre Coeur steps to take in the overlook of Paris. If you feel like it, check out the inside of Sacre Coeur while you’re there.

• Head to Place du Tertre and find a restaurant for a meal in Montmartre. There are plenty to choose from.

Below is a route you can take through Montmartre, but feel free to find your own way from the Moulin Rouge to Sacre Coeur:

• Get public transport (you can catch Bus No 30 again, but this time back from Blanch to Trocadero, or get Metro Line 2 from Blanche towards Porte Dauphine Maréchal de Lattre de Tassigny, get off at Charles De Gaulle – Etoile and change to Metro Line 2 towards Nation and get off at Trocadero) or a taxi / uber back to Trocadero so that you get to Trocadero before the hour ends, any time from 8pm til midnight. Both the bus and the Metro options take roughly half an hour.

The Metro Route is shown in blue and green below:

• Finish your big day out watching the Eiffel tower sparkle on the hour for five minutes from one of the best views in Paris at Trocadero.

Itinerary 2:

• Start at 8am at Place De La Concorde and walk to the Louvre via a breakfast stop on Rue Rivoli as in Itinerary 1 above.

• Get to the Lourve at 9am. Take some photos from outside and move on.

• Walk 15 minutes to the Ile De La Cite, an island in the middle of the Seine and the oldest part of Paris. You will now spend 4 hours exploring the Ile De La Cite, Ile St Louis and Latin Quarter, including a stop for lunch in the Latin Quarter.

• Explore the Ile De La Cite first. On Ile De La Cite you will find the Notre Dame (currently under repair), Sainte Chapelle, the Conciergerie, Paris Point Zero, Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation and Marche aux Fleurs.

• Your first stop on Ile De La Cite is the stunning chapel Sainte Chapelle which requires a pre-purchased online ticket to enter – they can’t be bought at the entry due to current safety measures. The Conciergerie, which is the prison where Marie Antoinette and many others were held before execution in the French Revolution, is in the same complex, is also highly recommended. You can buy combination ‘skip-the-line’ tickets to both Sainte Chappelle and the Conciergerie together online.

• If you just want to visit Sainte Chappelle, you can do this in under 30 minutes. If you want to combine Sainte Chapelle and Conciergerie, rent a histopad at the entry to inform your visit and give yourself an hour to explore. You should aim to be leaving this complex by around 10.30.

• Once you’re done at Sainte Chapelle (and the Conciergerie if you visited), stroll 5 minutes to the Notre Dame via the pretty flower markets; Marche aux Fleurs. Souvenirs are sold here amongst the plants and bouquets.

• While the Notre Dame is closed at the moment, you can go out the front and find the Paris Point Zero on the ground. This is the geographical ‘centre’ of Paris from which all distances to other parts of France are set. Kissing a lover there is meant to ensure that they will love you forever (so be careful!). Leave the front of the Notre Dame by 11am.

The route you will have walked so far looks like this:

• Next walk to the neighbouring island of Ile St Louis to visit the the famous Berthillon icecream store, which is the most famous place in Paris for icecream. You can walk directly from Ile De La Cite to Ile Saint Louis over the Pont Saint Louis bridge at the eastern end of Ile De La Cite as shown below:

• If you’re not an icecream fan, we can’t be friends you could use this time to visit Memorial des Martyrs de la Deportation at the eastern end of Ile de la Cite. This moving and austere memorial commemorates the 200,000 French that died in Nazi concentration camps in WWII. You want to aim to be done on Ile De La Cite (or Ile St Louis) by 11.30.

• Once you are done on Ile De La Cite / Ile St Louis, walk between 5 and 10 minutes across the river to the Latin Quarter, which is named as such as the students at Sorbonne University in the area used to speak Latin. Here you will find lots of cute shops and lots of restaurants. This is one of the oldest parts of Paris and is filled with students and has a lot of soul.

Photo by Shvets Anna on Pexels.com

One of the most popular shops to visit in the Latin Quarter is the Shakespeare and Co bookstore on Rue de la Bucherie. You can also check out the Sorbonne University and old Roman Ruins.

The route from Berthillion to Shakespeare and Company bookstore shown below:

The Latin Quarter includes many options for a sit-down or take-away Parisian lunch. You will find a lot of restaurants around here sell a “Menu Du Jour” which includes at least two courses and includes traditional French dishes such as escargot, french onion soup and boeuf bourguignon. These menus make a great option for lunch on a one-day visit to Paris.

• Find a place to eat by around 12.30 so you can sit down for around an hour to enjoy your lunch. If you don’t want to have a sit-down lunch and would rather grab something on the go to keep sightseeing, you can use this time to visit the Pantheon.

• At 2.00pm get the Metro from Cluny La Sorbonne to La Motte-Picquet Grenelle. The metro will take about 15 minutes travel time. Then walk seven minutes to the Champ De Mars to take in the Eiffel Tower up close. The route of the metro is shown in brown below:

• Leave the Eiffel Tower area by 3.30pm, following the itinerary as above in Itinerary 1 to visit the Montmartre area and finish your night at Trocadero.

Public Transport:

For both itineraries, it is highly recommended that you pick up a one-day Navigo travel pass for public transport from the metro station closest to your hotel either the night before or at the very start of your one full day there. This pass gives you unlimited trips for one day.

You can buy a pass up to six days before using it and the pass is valid from 12.00am until 11.59pm on the day of use. One-day passes can also be purchased via the RAPT app on a smartphone.

The Navigo one-day pass is 7.50 euro for two zones. Most public transport trips around central Paris cost 1.90 euro. As you will be taking at least 2 to 3 trips on public transport in your one-day visit, depending on which itinerary you choose, it is slightly more expensive to buy the pass than to buy each ticket separately, but I think it is worth getting the pass for its convenience.

Furthermore, indidivual paper tickets are gradually being phased out by the Paris Government at the time of writing this post.

You can also use your one-day Navigo travel pass it for additional public transport trips, including to and from your hotel at the start and end of the day.

When you get the bus in Paris:

• Always board at the front
• Validate your ticket / tap your Navigo pass on the machines immediately as there are big fines for travelling without a validated ticket or tapped pass.
• Press one of the red buttons on board to notify the driver when you want to get off at the next stop
• Always exit through the rear doors

If you give either of my itineraries, or a combination of the two, a whirl, please let me know! I’ve also written about my favourite places in Paris here.