Paris

Tickets, which have changed completely

This is the practical thing most worth getting right before arriving.

• Cardboard tickets are finished. Sales of the carnet of ten stopped in 2023; sales of the individual cardboard ticket ended in late 2025; and the tickets themselves stopped being valid during 2026, with the window for exchanging leftovers now closed. Anyone holding old tickets from a previous trip is holding souvenirs.
• What to buy instead is a Navigo Easy card — rechargeable, not tied to a name, shareable between adults, and able to hold single journeys and digital carnets — or tickets bought in the regional transport app on a phone.
• A contactless bank card will not get anyone through a Métro barrier yet. It works on buses in Paris and the inner suburbs, and on the Montmartre funicular, but the Métro and suburban rail rollout only begins on line 1 in 2027 and runs through to 2030. Tapping a bank card also costs more per journey and includes no transfers.
• There is now a single flat fare across the whole region. One price for any bus or tram journey, and one price for any Métro, RER or suburban train journey, regardless of distance — the old zone system is gone for single tickets. The airports are the exception, with their own fare, along with the dedicated airport services.

The Métro itself

The first line opened on 19 July 1900, which older accounts have right. The rest of their figures are not close. There are a little over three hundred stations, not nearly four hundred, and the Métro carries something like four million passengers a day rather than six — about one and a half billion a year, with three and a third billion journeys across the whole network including buses, trams and the RER.

One change worth knowing for anyone who last visited some years ago: line 14, automated and extended in 2024, is now the busiest line on the network, having overtaken line 1. It runs north–south through the centre, it is quick, and it reaches Orly.

Older accounts call the Métro safe and relatively clean, which is editorialising, and then advise walking instead, which is sound. Paris is small for a capital — about ten kilometres across the built-up middle — and the river gives a constant point of reference.

Driving, if it must be done

Two schemes now constrain cars in and around the city, and both are frequently misreported.

• A low-emission zone covers Paris and seventy-odd surrounding communes, and since January 2025 it has excluded the oldest vehicles — broadly diesels registered before 2011 and petrol cars before 2006 — on weekdays between eight in the morning and eight at night. Enforcement has so far been occasional and informational rather than by fine. Anything claiming that French low-emission zones were abolished in 2026 is wrong: parliament voted to scrap the obligation, and the Constitutional Council struck that article out in May 2026 as unrelated to the bill it was attached to. The zones remain law.
• The four central arrondissements are a limited-traffic zone, in force since November 2024. Through-traffic is banned at all hours; driving in is allowed if the destination is inside the zone. No fines are being issued for it yet.

The short version is that bringing a car into central Paris is now difficult on purpose, and there is no reason to.

The weather, and why the old advice is dangerous

Older accounts say the temperature rarely moves outside four degrees in winter and twenty-two in summer, and that rain never lasts long enough to spoil anything. The first half is no longer true and the second was never a fact.

The record high at the city's reference station is 42.6 °C, set on 25 July 2019. The average July maximum is now close to twenty-six. And 2026 brought three heatwaves: an exceptionally intense one in late June, during which Paris had ten consecutive nights that did not drop below twenty degrees; a second in July, which made July 2026 the hottest month recorded in France since 1900; and a third lasting twenty-three days from late July into August, equalling the longest on record.

So a visit in July or August should be planned around the heat rather than in spite of it: the churches and the museums in the afternoon, the walking early and late, and water carried. Spring and September are materially better months for this city than they used to be, which is a sentence no account written in 2009 would have needed.

What has reopened, and what has closed

• Notre-Dame reopened in December 2024, five years after the fire. Entry is free, and the towers reopened separately in September 2025.
• The Seine can be swum in. Three free supervised bathing sites opened in 2025 after the clean-up carried out for the Olympics, and operate in July and August.
• The Grand Palais reopened in June 2025 after four years. The science museum inside it is still closed, and due back in 2027.
• The Centre Pompidou is shut until 2030. The collection has been dispersed to other institutions in the meantime, and the building itself is a construction site.
• The Louvre is entering a decade of rebuilding, with a new entrance and a separate room for the Mona Lisa promised by 2031 — and, since January 2026, two different admission rates depending on whether a visitor lives in the European Economic Area. British visitors are now on the higher one.

The 2024 Olympics left less behind than expected, because almost every venue was existing or temporary. What did survive is worth knowing: the river bathing, the aquatics centre at Saint-Denis now open to the public, sixty kilometres of cycle route made permanent, and the athletes' village being converted into housing. The cauldron that flew over the Tuileries returns only as a summer installation.

The shape of the city

Paris is divided into twenty arrondissements, numbered in a spiral that begins at the Louvre and winds clockwise outwards — so the numbers are a rough guide to distance from the centre, and the odd effect is that the 1st and the 20th are nowhere near each other. Since 2020 the first four have been administered together as Paris Centre, which is the name now seen on signs and in official documents.

The river is the organising fact. The right bank is the commercial and royal side — the Louvre, the grands boulevards, the Marais, Montmartre — and the left bank the academic and literary one. The Seine itself, and the quays between the Pont de Sully and the Pont d'Iéna, are a World Heritage Site, inscribed in 1991.

Two major museums belong on any itinerary and are not dealt with separately here: the Musée d'Orsay, the Impressionist collection in a converted railway station on the left bank, and the Palais Garnier, the opera house, which can be visited by day as well as attended by night.

How big it is, and the name

Older accounts give two million people in the city and eleven million in the region. The city is still just over two million — but it has been losing residents steadily since 2012, and the region is now about twelve and a half million, so the regional figure understates by well over a million.

On the nickname: la Ville Lumière is singular — the City of Light, not Lights. It is usually traced to the street lanterns introduced under Louis XIV, when lighting a whole city at night was a genuine novelty, and sometimes to the city's place in the Enlightenment a century later. Both explanations circulate; the first is the better documented.

And one small correction worth making because it recurs. The Disneyland east of the city opened in 1992, which makes it twentieth-century rather than twenty-first — and Versailles is seventeenth-century, so the pairing older accounts make of the two is out by a hundred years at one end.