Notre-Dame de Paris: free audio guide, opening hours and towers

Notre-Dame de Paris is the city’s great Gothic cathedral, on the Île de la Cité, begun in 1163 and reopened in December 2024 after the 2019 fire. Entry is free every day; booking a time slot is also free, optional, and simply cuts the queue. This free audio guide lasts about 3½ minutes and is made for the square in front of the cathedral and the walk down the nave.

What the Notre-Dame audio guide covers

Press play on the square, facing the west front, and keep it running as you walk in. These are its stops:

Notre-Dame opening hours and free booking

The cathedral is open every day of the year: Monday to Friday from 7:50am to 7pm, with late opening until 10pm on Thursdays, and Saturday and Sunday from 8:15am to 7:30pm. Last entry is 30 minutes before closing. Admission is free.

Booking is free and optional. A reservation gives you a timed entry and a shorter wait, but you can always get in without one. Slots open at very short notice, on the day or a few hours ahead, and are meant for people who are already in Paris. You book on the cathedral’s official website, notredamedeparis.fr, or in its app, and the ticket arrives by email.

Notre-Dame is a working church, so dress accordingly: shoulders, chest, stomach and thighs covered, and men take off caps and hats inside.

What to see inside Notre-Dame

The first thing that strikes you is the light. The stone was cleaned during the restoration, and a nave that many visitors remember as grey is now a pale honey colour. Walking in through the central portal, the Last Judgement, you take in the whole church, with its 5 aisles, at once, with the choir at the far end.

Halfway down, the transept opens out, with the north and south rose windows on either side, great wheels of medieval stained glass. The third, the west rose, is behind you, above the entrance.

Next comes the choir, with its altar and carved wooden stalls, and around it the ambulatory, the walkway that circles it. From there you can see the choir screen, lined with painted stone reliefs, and the side chapels.

From the south ambulatory you reach the treasury, in the sacristy, with sacred vessels, vestments and books still used in services. It opens Monday to Saturday from 9:30am to 6pm, until 8:30pm on Thursdays, and on Sundays from 1pm to 5:30pm. Tickets cost €12, or €6 for under-18s, students and jobseekers, and under-5s go free. You buy them at the treasury desk; there is no online booking.

For a first look at the restored building, DW News explains in 6 minutes what the restoration changed:

Notre-Dame towers: tickets and opening times

The towers are a separate visit, with their own ticket and their own operator, the Centre des monuments nationaux. They reopened on 20 September 2025 with a new route that takes about 50 minutes. It is 424 steps to the top of the south tower, 69 metres up, and part of the climb is a brand-new oak staircase of 178 steps that winds up through the belfry.

On the way you pass scale models of the cathedral, 2 original chimeras that survived the fire, and Emmanuel, the great bell cast in 1686; from the cistern courtyard you look across the roof timbers known as “the forest”. At the top, all of Paris is laid out around you, with the spire close by; time at the summit is limited to 5 minutes.

History of Notre-Dame: from 1163 to the fire

In 1163 Bishop Maurice de Sully laid the first stone, on the foundations of earlier churches. Until the mid-13th century it was the largest religious building in the Western world, and its towers were finished around 1250. In 1831 Victor Hugo’s novel Notre-Dame de Paris, known in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, made it famous again at a time when it was badly run down, and from 1844 the architects Viollet-le-Duc and Lassus restored it; the spire that burned in 2019 was theirs. On 26 August 1944 General de Gaulle came to Notre-Dame to celebrate the liberation of Paris.

On 15 April 2019 a fire destroyed the spire and much of the roof. The spire rose again, 96 metres tall, in December 2023, and the cathedral reopened on 8 December 2024. In July 2025 the last of the 16 large statues around the base of the spire went back into place.

The B1M tells the full story of the rebuild in this 12-minute film:

Getting to Notre-Dame and accessibility

The cathedral stands at 6 Parvis Notre-Dame, on the Île de la Cité. The metro stop on the island is Cité (line 4); Saint-Michel (RER B and C) and Châtelet or Hôtel de Ville (lines 1, 7, 11 and 14) are also close. Buses 21, 24, 27, 38, 58, 75, 81, 85 and 96 stop nearby.

Wheelchair users enter through the central portal, with priority access and no booking needed, and a platform lift in the north transept leads to the ambulatory and the chapels. The cathedral does not lend wheelchairs. Signs are in French, English and Spanish, and the free official app has tours in 7 languages. Allow 3½ minutes for the audio guide, the queue if you have not booked and, if you climb, about 50 minutes for the towers.

Restoration work continues outside. There is scaffolding around the east end, for its walls and its 22 flying buttresses; the redesign of the cathedral’s surroundings is due to run until 2027, and work on the great rose windows is set to start in early 2027.

More audio guides to pair with Notre-Dame

If you are following France’s great churches of Our Lady, Marseille has Notre-Dame de la Garde, the basilica that watches over the port of Marseille:

Free audio guideNotre-Dame de la Garde

And if you are comparing Gothic churches, London has Westminster Abbey, and in Spain there is Santiago de Compostela Cathedral:

Free audio guideWestminster Abbey

All our audio guides for the city are in Paris.