Notre Dame Cathedral Paris

• History
• Hotels
• Where is Notre Dame Location?
• Notre Dame Cathedral Facts
  • The West Facade
• Notre Dame Cathedral on Fire

Highlights

• Notre Dame’s rose windows, three of them, survived the 2019 fire and still fill the nave with color.
• Its walls lean on flying buttresses, a structural fix Gothic builders needed here before it spread to every great cathedral that followed.
• Entry is free, but reserving a timed slot online is the only way around the queue that builds along the parvis.

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Plan Your Visit

What to See & Do

Notre Dame Cathedral opens onto the same west facade that has faced the Île de la Cité since the 13th century. Twenty-eight kings line the gallery above the three portals, carvings recreated after revolutionary crowds beheaded the originals in the 1790s, mistaking them for French monarchs rather than the Old Testament kings they actually represent. (The real heads, once a batch turned up buried in a bank’s foundations in 1977, went to the Musée de Cluny.)

Notre Dame Cathedral was among the first Gothic buildings anywhere to lean on flying buttresses. Its walls climbed higher and thinner than earlier Romanesque churches could manage on their own, so builders added the stone arches you’ll see bracing the exterior today, a fix that later spread to Chartres, Reims, and every great cathedral that followed.

Inside, the three rose windows, north, south, and west, survived the fire that tore through the spire and lead roof in under two hours on 15 April 2019. Stand under the north rose and you’re looking at glass installed in the 1250s, cleaned during the restoration but never replaced.

Walk toward the choir and you’ll pass the cathedra, the bishop’s throne that gives the cathedral its name: seat of the Archbishop of Paris, a role currently held by Laurent Ulrich. Mass happens here daily. Unlike a museum, you might find a service underway a few pews from where you’re standing.

The building also has a second life in fiction. Victor Hugo set The Hunchback of Notre-Dame here in 1831, partly to shame Paris into saving a cathedral that was, at the time, crumbling and half-abandoned. It worked. The novel’s popularity fed directly into the 19th-century restoration led by architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, the same man whose spire design came down in the 2019 fire and has now gone back up exactly as he drew it.

Did You Know That? Facts

1. Construction ran nearly two centuries, from 1163 to about 1345, which is why the west facade mixes early and late Gothic styles.
2. Joan of Arc was beatified inside Notre Dame Cathedral in 1909, almost 500 years after she was burned at the stake as a heretic.
3. Revolutionary crowds ransacked the cathedral in the 1790s, melted the bells for cannon metal, and used the nave to store food before Napoleon returned it to the Church in 1802.
4. The 2019 fire tore through the spire and roof in under two hours. Rebuilding it took five years and an army of stonemasons, carpenters, and roofers.
5. Notre-Dame de Paris means Our Lady of Paris, a dedication to the Virgin Mary repeated in cathedral names across the French-speaking world.

For the full 860-year story, read our complete history of Notre Dame Cathedral. For dimensions and more numbers, see our Notre Dame facts page.

Insider Tips

• The choir screen on the north side of the ambulatory carries surviving medieval relief panels that most visitors walk straight past on their way to the exit.
• Move past the crowd taking selfies at the main portal and walk south along the quai instead, for a straight-on view of the flying buttresses with nobody in the frame.
• Download the cathedral’s official app before you land. It’s the fastest way to check the day’s Mass schedule or any last-minute closures.

FAQs

Frequently Booked Together