Walk the Île de la Cité,
your way.

Every Paris story starts on the Île de la Cité. Around 250 BC a Celtic tribe called the Parisii built a settlement on this 9-hectare island in the middle of the Seine - it was easier to defend than the marshy banks. When Julius Caesar arrived in 53 BC he called the place Lutetia and made it the regional capital. When Clovis became the first king of the Franks in 508 AD he made it his royal seat. When Hugues Capet started the dynasty that gave France its first 800 years of monarchs in 987, the royal palace stood where the Conciergerie stands now. The Île de la Cité is, quite literally, the spot Paris began.

The medieval island

By 1200, the island was a small medieval city in its own right - the royal palace and Sainte-Chapelle on the western half, the cathedral chapter and Bishop's Palace on the eastern half, in between a packed neighbourhood of narrow streets, half-timber houses, taverns, schools and the medieval Hôtel-Dieu hospital (Paris's first, founded 651 AD - though the current building is 19th-century, it stands on the same spot). The chapter wanted to build a great cathedral, and in 1163 Bishop Maurice de Sully laid the foundation stone for Notre-Dame. The cathedral took 182 years to finish (1163-1345); by the time it was complete the medieval city had grown around it.

The medieval royal palace expanded westward. In 1239 King Louis IX (Saint Louis) acquired what he believed was Christ's Crown of Thorns from the Latin Emperor of Constantinople, who needed cash, and Louis paid more for the crown than he later paid for the entire Sainte-Chapelle to house it. Built in just six years (1242-1248), Sainte-Chapelle is the most concentrated piece of medieval craftsmanship in northern Europe: the upper chapel walls are 75 percent stained glass, 1,113 panels telling Old and New Testament scenes from the Creation to the Apocalypse, supported on improbably slender stone ribs. The Crown of Thorns is no longer here - it was moved to Notre-Dame, was rescued from the 2019 fire by chaplain Jean-Marc Fournier, and is now in the cathedral treasury again, behind glass.

The royal palace becomes a prison

The kings of France moved out of the Île de la Cité palace in 1370 - Charles V preferred the Louvre, then the Hôtel Saint-Pol, and his successors gradually abandoned the medieval complex altogether. The palace became a courts and a prison; the Concierge (the keeper of the palace, hence "Conciergerie") ran a small jail in the basement. By the time of the Revolution, the Conciergerie was the city's main holding prison: prisoners awaiting trial at the Revolutionary Tribunal upstairs were held in the medieval cells below. Marie Antoinette spent the last six weeks of her life here, from August to October 1793, in a tiny cell now reconstructed as a chapel; she was beheaded at the Place de la Concorde on 16 October. Robespierre, who had sentenced her, was held in the same prison and beheaded ten months later, on the same square.

Haussmann clears, Viollet-le-Duc restores

By 1860 the medieval island was a slum - the houses around Notre-Dame were dilapidated, the streets narrow, the Hôtel-Dieu hospital cramped and unsanitary. Baron Haussmann, Napoleon III's prefect of the Seine, demolished almost the entire medieval neighbourhood on the island. The current Place du Parvis Notre-Dame (the open square in front of the cathedral) was made by tearing down five medieval streets and a hospital. The Hôtel-Dieu was rebuilt as a single vast 1877 block. Place Louis-Lépine (today the Marché aux Fleurs) was opened up. Whole streets - Rue Neuve-Notre-Dame, Rue de la Vieille-Drapière - simply ceased to exist.

At the same time, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc was restoring Notre-Dame. The cathedral was a wreck by 1840 - the Revolution had decapitated all 28 statues of the Kings of Judah on the facade (the heads were dumped in a courtyard and only rediscovered in 1977; they're now in the Cluny museum), the spire had been removed in 1786, the interior was used as a warehouse during the Revolution. Victor Hugo's 1831 novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame galvanised public opinion and started the restoration. Viollet-le-Duc spent 25 years on it (1845-1870) and added the spire we now think of as iconic - a 19th-century construction in 13th-century style. That same spire fell on 15 April 2019.

The fire, and the reopening

At 18:50 on Monday 15 April 2019 a fire broke out in the roof structure of Notre-Dame, almost certainly from an electrical short during renovation. The 13th-century oak rafters (the "forest", an irreplaceable medieval forest of timber) burned through. The 96-metre spire collapsed at 19:50, falling through the vaulting. The fire was finally extinguished at 09:00 the next morning. By then the spire was gone, the roof was gone, much of the vaulting had collapsed, the great organ was choked with toxic lead dust - but the stone walls, both towers, all three rose windows, the great organ casing, and the wooden choir stalls had survived. Within 24 hours President Macron pledged the cathedral would reopen in five years.

The reconstruction was a national project. 2,000 craftsmen and labourers, 1,000 oak trees felled across France for the new "forest" of the roof, 1,200 sculptors and stone-cutters trained or retrained. The spire was reconstructed exactly to Viollet-le-Duc's 1859 design - not modernised. The interior was deep-cleaned (lead dust was the major challenge). New stained glass for the six lateral chapels was commissioned but the decision was deferred in 2024. On Sunday 8 December 2024 - just under five and a half years after the fire - the cathedral reopened to the public. Mass is back. Entry is free. The treasury, including the rescued Crown of Thorns, is back behind glass. The towers will reopen in 2026.

The smaller, quieter Île Saint-Louis

The island just east of the Cité is the Île Saint-Louis - smaller (11 hectares to the Cité's 9, just one street long instead of three), much quieter, completely different in character. Originally two undeveloped pasture islands; the developer Christophe Marie was given permission in 1614 to merge them, build embankments, lay out streets and put up identical 17th-century townhouses. The work was finished by 1664. The island has barely changed since: same street plan, same buildings, no tour buses, a few hundred residents, one church (Saint-Louis-en-l'Île, baroque, surprisingly grand), and Berthillon. Hemingway lived briefly at 71 Rue Cardinal Lemoine just off the Pont Sully. Daumier lived here. Rothschild had a townhouse. Today it is the city's most expensive postcode per square metre - and a 20-minute walk from end to end.