Notre-Dame Cathedral

Church · Île de la Cité (4th)Paris,France

A Gothic cathedral on an island in the Seine, begun in 1163, among the first to use flying buttresses, reopened in 2024 after the fire.

Notre-Dame de Paris stands on the Île de la Cité, and since the end of 2024 it is open again, its limestone scrubbed pale after a five-year restoration. You approach across a stone parvis, and the west front rises in careful symmetry: two square towers, a gallery of kings, and deep-carved portals that served medieval Paris as a Bible in stone. Step inside and the nave draws your eye upward into cool shadow. Three rose windows fill the interior with coloured light. Building began in 1163 and took nearly two centuries. This was among the first great churches to raise the flying buttress, external arches that carry the roof's weight outward and free the walls for wide sheets of glass. The fire of April 2019 destroyed the roof and toppled the spire, but the great stone vaults largely held, and hundreds of craftspeople rebuilt the oak beams as before. France still measures road distances from a bronze star set in the square outside.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Entry is free but slotted, and the towers are a separate booking — the cathedral releases timed reservations a couple of days ahead, and tower tickets are not sold at the door.
Come at first light — the parvis is nearly empty, and a low sun rakes across the west front, throwing every carved figure into sharp relief.
Read the central portal — above the main door the Last Judgment still ranks the saved and the damned in tiers; look for the archangel Michael weighing souls in the middle.
Look twice at the gallery of kings — Revolutionary crowds beheaded them as French royalty; twenty-one heads turned up in 1977 under a bank on the Chaussée-d'Antin, and today's row is copies.
Remember it is a living church — Mass is still said here; if you arrive mid-service, keep to the side aisles and move quietly.

Things to do

1
Find Point Zéro on the parvis
Stand in the wide square before the west front and hunt the pavement for the small bronze star that marks Point Zéro. Then step back and let your eyes climb slowly — the three deep portals, the long row of stone kings, and the twin towers above.
2
Face the rose windows from the crossing
Walk to the crossing and take the three rose windows in turn. The north one is worth the longest look: most of its glass is thirteenth-century and it faces away from the sun, so it reads deep blue and stays legible all day. The south window only fires in the afternoon.
3
Circle to the flying buttresses
Follow the riverside path around to the eastern end. From the small garden behind the apse the buttresses show what they are for: each is a stone arm reaching from a free-standing pier to the exact point on the wall where the vault pushes outward. The rebuilt spire rises clean above them.
4
Watch the towers double in the Seine
Come back after dark and look from the Pont de l'Archevêché. What is new in the night silhouette is the spire: it went back up in 2023 to Viollet-le-Duc's nineteenth-century design, and the gilded rooster on top is a replacement, the original having been found buckled in the rubble.