Paris
France's capital, the City of Light on the Seine
Paris arranges itself with a deliberate grace that few cities match. Hausmann's cream-colored boulevards fan out from grand intersections, the Eiffel Tower anchors the western skyline, and the Seine curls through the center past Notre-Dame on its island in the stream. It is a city built to be walked and admired — its cafés, its bookstalls, its symmetrical gardens — yet beneath the postcard surface lies a working metropolis of more than eleven million in its wider region, the dense, multilingual heart of France.
The city sits in a broad basin on the Seine, mostly flat at around 35 metres above sea level but rising to the butte of Montmartre at 130 metres, crowned by the white domes of Sacré-Cœur. The river divides Paris into the Right Bank and Left Bank, each with its own character, and two wooded islands — the Île de la Cité and Île Saint-Louis — mark the ancient core. A temperate, often grey climate keeps the parks green, and the twenty arrondissements spiral outward from the center like a snail's shell.
A Celtic tribe called the Parisii settled the Île de la Cité around the third century BCE, and the Romans built their town of Lutetia on the Left Bank. Through the centuries Paris became the capital of the French kings, the crucible of the Revolution, and a magnet for artists and writers from Hemingway to the Impressionists. Today it remains a global capital of fashion, gastronomy, and ideas, drawing tens of millions of visitors a year to the Louvre, the boulevards, and the banks of the Seine.