Notre-Dame was commissioned in 1160 by Bishop Maurice de Sully, who wanted to rival the smart new abbey that had just gone up in St-Denis. It replaced the earlier St-Etienne...

The primary colours, exposed pipes and air ducts make this one of the best-known sights in Paris. The then-unknown Italo-British architectural duo of Renzo Piano and Richard...

No building better symbolises Paris than the Tour Eiffel. Maupassant claimed he left Paris because of it, William Morris visited daily to avoid having to see it from afar - and...

The palace itself was built in the 1620s for Marie de Médicis, widow of Henri IV, by Salomon de Brosse on the site of the former mansion of the Duke of Luxembourg. Its...

By the mid 1780s, Paris's largest cemetery near Les Halles had become so dangerous and insalubrious that it was closed by royal decree. Bones were to be transferred to a...

The Musée d'Orsay follows a chronological route, from the ground floor to the upper level and then to the mezzanine, showing links between Impressionist painters and their...

Built for Cardinal Richelieu by Jacques Lemercier, the building was once known as the Palais Cardinal. Richelieu left it to Louis XIII, whose widow Anne d'Autriche preferred it...

Work on this enormous mock Romano-Byzantine edifice began in 1877. It was commissioned after the nation's defeat by Prussia in 1870, voted for by the Assemblée Nationale and...

As in large swathes of the rest of Paris, there are changes afoot at the Louvre. Work continues on the new Islamic Arts department, which should open in 2010; when it does, it...