Paris Travel Blog

What makes half a million people a year visit the Impressionist painter Claude Monet’s garden at Giverny? For me, May was the perfect time for a first visit to find out. The sky was blue, the sun was shining, the frogs were on the lilypads and the wisteria was in flower. As a result, the Japanese bridge...

When you join the throng trekking through Monet’s house and garden at Giverny, spare a thought for how he inspired American artists. The street where Americans past and present found Monet © Renata Rubnikowicz Monet moved to Giverny in 1883 and soon other painters, especially American Impressionists,...

Tomorrow, Saturday 14 May, for one night only, nearly all of the museums in Paris will be open late, mostly until midnight, celebrating the annual European Museums Night. As well as keeping their doors open way past their usual bedtime for visits to their regular collections and their temporary exhibitions,...

Though it was recently voted the world’s most popular city for tourists by none other than TripAdvisor, Paris can be expensive. All those café coffees and museum tickets add up. Savvy travellers take advantage of what’s free. And free fun in the streets may just be why Paris remains in the world...

It’s opera weekend all over Europe this Saturday and Sunday (7 and 8 May), and Paris is not going to be left out of the festivities. Impecunious opera buffs will, of course, be flocking to the free performances, but if you’ve yet to decide whether arias are your thing, be assured that the events...

C’est vrai un sacre printemps! (It really is a blessed spring!) Opening earlier this month on a weekend when temperatures reached an unseasonal 24C (75F), La Foire du Trône welcomed thousands in its first couple of days. One of the oldest-established funfairs in Europe, La Foire du Trône is situated...

If, like a group of Chicagoans I met in the queue, you say, “Well we were visiting the museum, so we figured we’d see the special exhibition, too,” the Musée d’Orsay’s latest blockbuster will show you everything you wanted to know about Manet – and quite probably more. Billed as one of the...

Here’s an exhibition of an Impressionist painter who only has one really famous painting (Les raboteurs de parquet, or The Floor Scrapers, now in the Musée d’Orsay), which is not even on show here at the Musée Jacquemart-André, with work by his brother, a previously overlooked photographer. So...

As the main tourist season gets under way in the approach to Easter, today’s edition of the Paris local newspaper Le Parisien has a timely warning for visitors to Sacre-Coeur. Sacre-Coeur: Tourist trap? © Jacques Lebar / Paris Tourist Office Tourist traps plague every big city and sadly Paris is...

This Sunday, 10 April,  more than 40,000 runners will set off from the top of the Champs-Elysées for the 35th annual Paris Marathon. Paris being a relatively small city they will get the chance to see almost all its big sights over the 42.195 kilometre course. Visitors as well as locals will be turning...