Rated Tourist Attractions in Paris

Covering 55 hectares, the Parc de La Villette is the largest landscaped green space in Paris. The park is brimming with attractions, including children's playgrounds and the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie (Museum of Science and Technology).

On warm, sunny days during the summer months (early July through mid-August), tourists and locals flock to the banks along the Seine River for a mini holiday experience. The city of Paris brings public amenities to several areas, which are designed especially for relaxation and recreation.

Away from the more touristy areas of central Paris, the Père Lachaise Cemetery in the 20th arrondissement is the city's most famous and most visited cemetery. This 44-hectare space is the final resting place of many famous men and women, including Honoré de Balzac, Frédéric Chopin, Edith Piaf, Oscar Wilde, and Jim Morrison.

A peaceful little oasis of nature that is treasured by locals, the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont is completely unlike other gardens of Paris. The 25-hectare hilltop park has the feeling of an untamed pastoral landscape, in contrast to Paris' formal French gardens, with their orderly rows of flowerbeds and pollarded trees.

In the west of Paris at the end of Avenue Charles-de-Gaulle is a complex of high-rise buildings developed since the mid 1960s. This business district just outside the city limits of Paris is named La Défense, which recalls the bitter resistance by French forces in this area during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871.

Commissioned by Napoleon III in 1860, the Palais Garnier Opera House was designed by Charles Garnier in an exuberant Baroque style. Garnier worked tirelessly on the project for over a decade, from 1862 to 1875. Today, this show-stopping landmark is a symbol of Napoleon's Imperial regime.

The Musée d'Orsay displays a splendid collection of 19th- and 20th-century art (created from 1848 to 1914) in the converted Gare d'Orsay. This Belle Epoque railway station was built for the Universal Exhibition of 1900.

The most monumental boulevard in Paris used to be a desolate field of marshland until the 17th century, when it was landscaped by André Le Nôtre. A century later, the Parisian city planner Baron Haussmann designed the boulevard's elegant buildings.

Notre-Dame stands in the heart of Paris on the Île-de-la-Cité next to the Latin Quarter. An island in the Seine River, the Île-de-la-Cité is the historical and geographical center of Paris. On this small plot of land, the Romans built the Gallo-Roman city of Lutetia, and from the 6th century to the 14th century, the Kings of France resided here.

A sumptuous palace that was once the home of France's kings, the Louvre is the most important of Paris' top museums. Visitors enter the museum in the courtyard of the palace at the Pyramid du Louvre, the glass pyramid designed by Ieoh Ming Pei in 1917. The Musée du Louvre displays thousands of artworks, many of which are considered masterpieces, from antiquities to European paintings of the 15th to 19th centuries.