Montmartre

Neighborhood · Montmartre (18th)Paris,France

A hilltop village on the highest ground in Paris, with a working vineyard, gypsum mines beneath it, and painters drawn up by cheap rent.

Montmartre is the hilltop village that crowns the highest ground in Paris, reached by staircase and cobbled lane. You climb past shuttered houses, ivy and a working vineyard on the north slope, and at the top Place du Tertre fills with easels and portrait painters. From the basilica steps the grey-and-zinc sweep of the city opens below. Cheap rents, low wine tax and clear northern light pulled a generation of painters up here — Renoir, Van Gogh, Picasso and Toulouse-Lautrec all worked on the butte. The hill is hollow underneath: old gypsum mines honeycomb it, and the soft white rock cut here gave the world plaster of Paris. Before the painters this was farmland above the city, with windmills grinding grain and vineyards on the slopes, a separate village annexed to Paris only in 1860. Place du Tertre is crowded and commercial now; the quiet is a street away, in the sloping alleys where the village feel survives. The crowds thin at dusk and the steps become the place to sit.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Turn your back on the tour groups — one street north or west of Place du Tertre and the coach crowds vanish into genuinely sleepy village lanes.
Never sit for the first portraitist who waves you over — the licensed painters keep to the square's centre; the pushiest touts on the edges are rarely the best hands.
The terrace looks south over Paris, not at the basilica — the city view is richest in late-afternoon light, while the pale domes behind you catch their warmest glow near sunset.
La Maison Rose and Rue de l'Abreuvoir — are the pink-walled corner every painter chose; arrive early, before the queue for the same three frames forms.
The vineyard sits fenced and closed most of the year — its one open weekend is the October harvest festival, the rare chance to step inside the clos itself.

Things to do

1
Climb by Rue Lepic past the last windmill
Skip the packed funicular and central stairs and wind up through the western lanes instead — Rue Lepic or Rue Tholozé — past a surviving windmill and shuttered village houses. Let the cobbles and staircases pull you upward, arriving at the summit from behind, where the crowds thin and the old village hush still holds.
2
Watch the easels at Place du Tertre
Stand at the edge of Place du Tertre, where portrait painters and caricaturists work at their easels under the plane trees. Move slowly around the square, watching brushes load with colour and quick strokes land on paper — the whole trade performed in the open, much as it has been for well over a century.
3
Take the steps as the light drops
Climb to the terrace below Sacré-Cœur in the last hour before sunset and settle on the stone steps. Look out over the city and watch its grey rooftops and distant towers slide from gold into deep blue, as the streetlamps flicker on one by one in the streets far below you.
4
Find the vines and the pink house
Walk down Rue des Saules on the north slope to the fenced rows of the Clos Montmartre vineyard, with the old Au Lapin Agile cabaret on the corner below. Loop back past La Maison Rose and Rue de l'Abreuvoir, the cobbled bend that a hundred painters have set on canvas.