Paris, France
Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris · noh-truh DAHM duh pah-REE
The cathedral of Paris, begun in 1163 on an island in the Seine. In April 2019 its roof and spire burned in front of the world. It reopened in December 2024, rebuilt by hand in oak and stone, and cleaner and brighter inside than anyone living had seen it.
Photo: AlSepPhoenix, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
You are standing on the island where Paris began, in front of its cathedral. The first stone was laid in 1163, and the building took about 180 years. It was one of the first great churches in the new style we call Gothic: thin walls, tall windows, and stone ribs that carry the weight.
On the evening of 15 April 2019 fire broke out under the roof. The oak frame, eight hundred years old, burned through, and the spire fell. Five years and eight months later the cathedral opened again.
The cathedral is free. The towers, the treasury and the museum under the square each have their own ticket, and the towers are run by a different body from the church.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The west front and the square | Free, always open |
| The cathedral | Free; a free time slot can be booked |
| The rose windows | Free |
| The choir screen and the crown of thorns | Free; the relic is shown on set days |
| The treasury | Ticket, bought inside |
| The towers | Ticket, booked online for a set time |
| The archaeological crypt under the square | Separate museum and ticket |
The front is a grid: three doors, a row of twenty-eight kings, a round window, a gallery of thin columns, two square towers. The towers were meant to carry spires and never got them.
Every statue and carving was once painted in bright colours. People who could not read learned the Bible from these doorways.
Go in. The stone is pale gold. Before the fire it was grey with eight centuries of candle smoke and dust. The cleaning that followed the fire is the first the whole interior has ever had.
Look up where the nave and the cross-arm meet. That vault fell in when the spire came down. The stones are new. The three great round windows are old, and the fire did not break them.
"The gargoyles are medieval." The real gargoyles are the long water spouts, and many are old. The famous monsters that sit on the towers and look down at Paris were invented in the 1850s by the restorer Viollet-le-Duc.
"The spire that burned was medieval." The first spire was taken down in the 1780s because it was unsafe. The one that fell in 2019 was Viollet-le-Duc's, of 1859. The one you see is a copy of his, finished in 2024.
"You have to buy a ticket." The cathedral is free. A free time slot can be booked, and it is not required. Websites that sell entry are selling something that costs nothing.
"Quasimodo lived here." He is a character in a novel of 1831 by Victor Hugo.
The first three stops are outside. Then you go in, and the last two stops are the fire and the towers.
Set in the paving of the square is a small bronze star. Every distance by road in France is measured from it. Paris began on this island as a Celtic and then a Roman town. Under the square is a museum of the Roman and medieval walls found there.
In 1163 Bishop Maurice de Sully, a peasant's son, began to pull down the old cathedral and build a new one a third longer. He did not live to see even the nave finished.
The middle door shows the Last Judgment. Read it from the bottom up. The dead climb out of their graves. An angel and a devil weigh souls, and the devil is pressing down his side of the scale. Christ sits at the top. The saved go left, to heaven. The damned are led right, in chains.
Above the doors stand twenty-eight kings of ancient Judah, ancestors of Mary. In 1793 revolutionaries took them for kings of France and pulled them down. Those you see were carved in the 1840s. In 1977 workmen digging under a bank across the river found twenty-one of the original heads, buried by a royalist who had bought them as building stone.
Walk round to the river side. The stone arches that leap from the outer piers to the top of the wall are flying buttresses. They catch the outward push of the vault and carry it to the ground. With them the walls no longer had to be thick, and could be opened into glass.
The builders here were among the first to use them, about 1180.
Above the roof rises the new spire, 96 metres from the ground. It is made of a thousand oaks and covered in lead, exactly as it was in 1859. At its tip is a new golden rooster. Inside the rooster are relics saved from the old one, and a roll with the names of the two thousand people who worked on the rebuilding.
The vault is 33 metres above you. Each bay is carried by two crossing ribs of stone, and the thin web between them is only fifteen centimetres thick. That thin web is what held when the burning roof fell on it.
After the fire every surface was vacuumed, then coated with a latex film that was peeled off with the dirt in it. The chapels along the sides turned out to be painted in strong reds, blues and golds, done in the 1860s and long hidden under grime.
The great organ has eight thousand pipes. None burned or melted, but all were coated in lead dust. They were taken out, cleaned one by one and tuned again over six months of nights.
The two great round windows at the ends of the cross-arm are almost thirteen metres across. The north one, of about 1250, still has most of its first glass. Its colour is a deep blue-violet, and it tells the Old Testament. The south one, given by King Louis IX about 1260, tells the New.
On the night of the fire the lead that holds the glass was within a few degrees of melting. The windows were taken apart afterwards, cleaned, and put back.
Round the outside of the choir runs a carved and painted screen of the 1300s. It tells the life of Christ in small scenes at eye level, and it is the best place in the church to see what medieval colour looked like.
At the far east end a new shrine holds the cathedral's greatest relic, a circle of rushes said to be the crown of thorns placed on Christ's head. Louis IX bought it in 1239 from the emperor in Constantinople for more than it cost him to build a chapel to keep it in. On the night of the fire a chain of firemen and clergy carried it out.
The marble group at the back of the choir, Mary with the dead Christ, was found after the fire standing untouched among the fallen beams, with the gold cross above it still shining.
The alarm rang at 18:18 on 15 April 2019, the Monday before Easter. A guard was sent to the wrong part of the roof and found nothing. By the time the fire was found, the frame of 1,300 oaks, which people called "the forest", was well alight.
At about 19:50 the spire fell through the vault. For an hour the north tower was burning inside, round the frame that holds the bells. If the bells had fallen, the tower would have gone, and probably the whole front with it. A team of firemen went up the stairs into the tower and put that fire out.
Nobody died. The cause has not been established. Investigators think an electrical fault or a cigarette most likely.
Gifts of 846 million euros came from 340,000 people in 150 countries. The new frame was cut from oaks felled across France and squared by hand with axes, as in the thirteenth century. The film Notre-Dame on Fire (2022), by Jean-Jacques Annaud, follows the night hour by hour.
The climb is 424 steps, up the south tower and down the north. It reopened in September 2025 with a new oak stair shaped like a double spiral. You pass the great bell called Emmanuel, cast in 1686, which weighs thirteen tonnes and rings only on great days. Then you come out among Viollet-le-Duc's monsters, sixty-nine metres above the square.
When the first stone was laid in 1163, the Southern Song (1127–1279) ruled from Hangzhou and the philosopher Zhu Xi was a young official. When the cathedral was finished about 1345, the Mongol Yuan dynasty had twenty-three years left.
A roof of timber that burns in an evening is a danger every old Chinese hall shares. In November 2019 China and France agreed to work together on two projects: the rebuilding here, and the conservation of the Terracotta Army in Xi'an.
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| 1163 | The first stone is laid | The Southern Song; Zhu Xi is thirty-three |
| about 1250 | The towers and the north rose window | The Mongols are conquering China |
| about 1345 | The cathedral is finished | The last decades of the Yuan |
| 1793 | The kings are pulled down in the Revolution | The British envoy Macartney meets the Qianlong Emperor |
| 1804 | Napoleon crowns himself here | The Jiaqing reign of the Qing |
| 1831 | Hugo's novel | The Daoguang reign, nine years before the first Opium War |
| 1844–1864 | The restoration under Viollet-le-Duc | The Opium Wars; the Old Summer Palace burns in 1860 |
| 2019 | The fire | China and France agree to cooperate on the rebuilding |
| 2024 | The cathedral reopens on 8 December | Sixty years of diplomatic relations between France and China |
One line to remember: 180 years to build, one evening to burn, five years to put back.
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
A young locksmith named Biscornet was ordered to make the ironwork for the doors. The task was beyond him, and he called on the devil. In the morning he was found senseless beside hinges so fine that no smith could say how they were made. The doors would not open until they were sprinkled with holy water.
Source: A Paris legend recorded in the seventeenth century
Whoever steps on the bronze star in the square will come back to Paris.
Source: Popular belief
The copper rooster from the tip of the old spire fell ninety metres into the fire. It was found the next morning in the rubble, dented and whole, with the relics still inside it. People called it a miracle.
Source: Reported by French newspapers on 16 April 2019; the finding is a fact, the word "miracle" is the press's
There was a real hunchback at Notre-Dame. An English sculptor who worked on repairs in the 1820s wrote in his memoir of a carver there whom everyone called "the Hunchback", and Hugo knew the workshop.
Source: The memoir of Henry Sibson, found in the Tate archive in 2010; that he inspired Quasimodo is a guess
Later, people who live here will be able to add the stories they grew up with, and say which of these they have heard.
Last checked 2026-11-12. Paris guides of 2026 and the city's tourist office; the cathedral's own English page showed out-of-date text when we opened it.
Checked 2026-11-12
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