Eiffel Tower → the Louvre

This is the walk every first-time Paris visitor ends up doing at least once, usually by accident: leave the Eiffel Tower, follow the river, arrive at the Louvre having seen half the postcard version of the city on the way.

The most direct walking route tracks the Seine — across the Pont d'Iéna, past the Palais de Tokyo, along the quays, and over toward the Tuileries Garden before arriving at the Pyramid. It's flat, mostly riverside, and one of the most scenic long walks in any major city, which is exactly why almost nobody takes the metro for this one even though it's faster.

The riverside route runs about 3.6 kilometers — 2.2 miles — noticeably longer than the straight-line distance between the two landmarks, since you're following the Seine's curve rather than cutting across the 7th and 1st arrondissements. That works out to roughly 4,900 steps for an average-height adult, per the standard conversion this site uses.

The Eiffel Tower was built as a temporary entrance arch for the 1889 World's Fair and was deeply unpopular with much of the Parisian art establishment at the time — a group of prominent writers and artists signed a public letter calling it a "useless and monstrous" eyesore before it was even finished. It was saved from a planned demolition twenty years later largely because it proved useful as a radio transmission tower, a practical justification that had nothing to do with the aesthetic argument that nearly got it torn down.

The Louvre's own history runs considerably deeper: the building started as a medieval fortress in the late 1100s, was converted into a royal palace over the following centuries, and only became a public museum after the French Revolution, when the new government opened the former royal art collection to citizens in 1793. The glass Pyramid entrance, now as recognizable as the museum itself, wasn't added until 1989 — and was just as controversial in its own era as the Eiffel Tower had been a century earlier.

Along the way, the route passes the Grand Palais and the gardens of the Champs-Élysées, both worth pausing for if the point of the walk is the walk itself rather than just the destination.

Walking somewhere else? Calculate your own route →