Rebecca Engel
Paris in winter is the version most visitors never see. The light goes soft and grey by four in the afternoon, the terraces move indoors, and the queues that wrap around every famous building from April to October simply aren’t there. It rains far more than it snows, and nobody pretends otherwise.
That trade is a good one. The same city costs less, moves slower, and hands over its best rooms without a two hour wait. These are nineteen things to do in Paris during winter, built around what the season actually gives you rather than a summer list with a coat thrown over it.
1. Have The Louvre Almost To Yourself In January
The Louvre takes around nine million people a year and a good share of them come between June and August. January is its quietest stretch by a wide margin.
You can stand in front of the Winged Victory without somebody’s phone in the frame, which is not a thing that happens in July. The Mona Lisa still draws a scrum. Almost nothing else does.
Go on a weekday morning right at opening, or take the late evening on a Wednesday or Friday when the museum stays open past nine and the crowd thins out after seven. It’s closed on Tuesdays.
Book a slot online anyway. Entry is timed even in the quiet months, and the walk up queue moves slower than the booked one.
2. Stand Inside Sainte Chapelle On A Bright Winter Morning
Sainte Chapelle is one small room on the Île de la Cité with fifteen windows of thirteenth century stained glass running two storeys up on every side. There are more than a thousand scenes in the glass, and on a clear day the whole space turns red and blue.
Winter sun sits low, which is the catch and also the point. You want a bright cold morning rather than a grey one, and you want to be there early, because the chapel is tiny and forty people fill it.
There’s a combined ticket with the Conciergerie next door, the old royal palace that later held prisoners through the Revolution. Both are indoors, both take about an hour, and they’re a hundred metres apart.
3. Sit With The Water Lilies At The Orangerie
The Orangerie sits at the far end of the Tuileries and it’s built around two oval rooms. Monet planned them himself. Eight enormous Water Lilies panels curve all the way around the walls, lit from above by daylight, with a bench in the middle and nothing else in the room.
It works better in winter than in summer for a simple reason. In August the rooms are full and you shuffle through. In February you can sit down for twenty minutes.
Downstairs there’s a whole second museum, the Walter Guillaume collection, heavy on Renoir, Cézanne and Soutine. The whole place takes about ninety minutes, which makes it a very good rainy afternoon.
4. Climb The Grand Staircase At The Opéra Garnier
The Palais Garnier opened in 1875 and it was built to be looked at as much as listened to. You can walk in during the day without a ticket to a show.
The self guided route takes you up the grand staircase and along the Grand Foyer, a gilded corridor of mirrors and chandeliers about the length of a city block. The auditorium has a Chagall ceiling painted in 1964, red velvet everywhere, and a chandelier that weighs several tons.
Whether you get into the auditorium depends on whether anyone is rehearsing that day, so it’s partly luck. The rest of the building is worth the ticket either way.
It’s warm, it’s indoors, and it takes about an hour, which makes it a good use of a cold afternoon.
5. Warm Up In The Musée Jacquemart André
This one is a house rather than a museum. It’s a nineteenth century mansion on Boulevard Haussmann that belonged to a banker and his wife, who spent forty years filling it with Italian Renaissance art and then left the whole thing to the state.
It reopened in 2024 after a year of restoration and it’s the warmest building on this list in both senses. Small rooms, heavy curtains, a Tiepolo ceiling over the staircase and a winter garden with a spiral stair running through it.
The tea room is in the old dining room, under another Tiepolo, and it’s the reason plenty of people come at all. Cake, a proper pot of tea, and a ceiling most museums would build a room around.
6. See Notre Dame Now That It Has Reopened
Notre Dame reopened in December 2024, five years after the fire, and the inside is startling if you knew it before. The stone was cleaned back to a pale cream colour that nobody alive had seen. It’s far brighter than it used to be.
Entry is free and always has been. From April to October the walk up queue runs one to three hours. In January it’s a fraction of that, which is on its own a strong argument for visiting Paris in winter.
There’s a free timed reservation on the cathedral’s own site, but the slots only open two or three days ahead, so it isn’t something you can lock in weeks out. In winter you can usually just turn up.
7. Order The Hot Chocolate At Angelina
Angelina has been on rue de Rivoli since 1903 and it sells one thing people queue for. The chocolat l’Africain is thick enough to coat a spoon, closer to melted chocolate than to a drink, and it arrives with a separate bowl of whipped cream.
It’s very sweet and very rich and one is plenty between two people. The tea room itself is all mirrors and painted panels and hasn’t changed much in a century.
There’s a queue most days and it does move. If it’s long, the other branches around the city come out of the same kitchen with a fraction of the wait.
8. Split A Galette Des Rois In January
Every bakery in Paris sells the same cake for the whole of January and then stops. The galette des rois is puff pastry with a frangipane filling, and there’s a small porcelain charm baked somewhere inside it.
Whoever finds the charm wears the paper crown that comes with the cake. That’s the entire tradition, and Parisians take it more seriously than you’d expect, grown adults in offices included.
It’s sold by the slice or whole and it’s in every bakery window from New Year onward. It’s also one of the very few things to do in Paris that you genuinely cannot do at any other time of year.
9. Eat Onion Soup At Bouillon Chartier
Chartier opened in 1896 as a workers’ canteen and never really stopped being one. The dining room is a listed interior of brass racks, mirrors and globe lamps, the tables are shared, and the waiter writes your bill on the paper tablecloth.
French onion soup here costs a few euros. So does everything else, which is why the queue outside runs down the street most evenings. They don’t take reservations and the line moves faster than it looks.
It isn’t the best food in Paris and it doesn’t pretend to be. It’s a hot cheap meal in a room that hasn’t changed in a hundred and thirty years, which in January is exactly the right thing.
10. Book A Raclette Table For A Cold Night
Raclette is a half wheel of cheese melted under a grill and scraped over potatoes, ham and pickles. Fondue is its pot based cousin. Both come from the Alps and both are winter food that makes no sense in July.
Paris has restaurants that do almost nothing else. Les Fondus de la Raclette has a handful of locations around the city, and Pain Vin Fromages in the Marais is the older and quieter version, down in a stone cellar.
Book ahead. These places fill from December through February and they’re small rooms. Go hungry, and wear something you don’t mind smelling of cheese for the rest of the night.
11. Order Oysters At A Brasserie In Oyster Season
Oysters in France are winter food. The old rule is to eat them only in months with an r in the name, which rules out the summer, and the season peaks around Christmas and New Year.
You’ll see it from the pavement. The big brasseries put a shucker outside in an apron with a knife, working through trays of ice, and the platters go straight in through the door behind him.
Bofinger near Bastille is the classic version, an 1864 brasserie under a stained glass dome. A dozen oysters, a glass of muscadet and some brown bread is a very Parisian hour, and it costs less than it looks like it should.
12. Wander The Covered Passages Around Galerie Vivienne
Before department stores, Paris had covered passages. They’re glass roofed shopping arcades cut between buildings, with mosaic floors and iron frames. There were around a hundred and fifty of them in the nineteenth century and about twenty are left.
They make the best rainy day walk in the city, because you can string four or five together and barely go outside. Galerie Vivienne from 1823 is the prettiest, with a tiled floor and a curved glass roof.
Passage des Panoramas nearby is the oldest and much scruffier, full of stamp dealers and small restaurants. Passage Jouffroy and Passage Verdeau carry on north across the boulevard.
Nearly all of them sit in the second and ninth arrondissements within ten minutes of each other, so the whole loop is an easy afternoon.
13. Look Up At The Galeries Lafayette Dome
Galeries Lafayette on Boulevard Haussmann has a stained glass dome from 1912 over the central atrium, ten storeys up, with the balconies wrapping around underneath it. You can walk in and look at it without buying anything, and plenty of people do exactly that.
In December they hang an enormous tree in the middle of the void under the dome, and it’s about the most photographed thing in Paris that month. It comes down in the first days of January, and the dome is just as good without it.
The rooftop terrace is free as well and open all year, with a flat view across to the Opéra and out to the Eiffel Tower. It’s cold up there in winter and usually close to empty.
14. Eat Lunch Under Cover At Marché Des Enfants Rouges
The Marché des Enfants Rouges in the Marais opened in 1615, which makes it the oldest covered market in Paris. The name comes from an orphanage that once stood on the site, where the children wore red.
It’s mostly a lunch place now. A dozen stalls under a roof doing Moroccan, Japanese, Italian and Lebanese food, a few greengrocers, shared tables in the middle and a real scrum at the weekend.
Go on a weekday and it’s calm. It’s closed on Mondays. Either way you eat well for not much, sitting down, out of the rain.
15. Steam At The Grande Mosquée De Paris Hammam
The Grande Mosquée de Paris was built in the 1920s in the fifth arrondissement, and there’s a hammam attached to it. Marble rooms, a domed steam chamber, and the option of a gommage, which is a black soap scrub that takes off more of you than you’d expect.
Entry runs around thirty euros and usually comes with mint tea afterwards. The scrub costs extra and there are no reservations, so you turn up and wait your turn.
The part to check first is that days are split between women and men, and the split changes, so look it up rather than walking over on spec.
The tea room and courtyard on the other side of the building are open to everyone. Mint tea and honey pastries under the fig trees is worth a stop on its own, even if you skip the steam.
16. Shop The January Soldes
France sets its sale dates by law. The winter soldes start on the second Wednesday of January and run for four weeks, everywhere in the country at once, which is why the whole of France appears to go shopping on the same morning.
Discounts open around thirty percent and deepen every week until the end. The first day has the best stock and the last week has the best prices, and the department stores are chaos on day one.
It’s the one time of year when shopping in Paris is a reasonable thing to plan a day around, and it lands in the same quiet weeks as everything else on this list.
17. Walk The Christmas Market On The Tuileries
The Tuileries market runs from the middle of November to the first days of January, in the garden between the Louvre and Place de la Concorde. It’s around eighty wooden chalets, a funfair, a big wheel and an ice rink, and it’s free to walk into.
It’s more fairground than craft market, which is worth knowing before you go hunting for handmade gifts. What it does very well is vin chaud in the cold with the Louvre lit up behind you.
This is the one item here with a hard end date. Come in late January and the garden is back to being a garden, so plan around it rather than counting on it.
18. Reach Sacré Cœur Without The Queue
Montmartre in August is a slow moving crowd from the funicular to the top of the steps. In January, on a weekday morning, it goes back to being a hill in a residential neighbourhood with a very large church on it.
The basilica is free and open every day. The dome climb costs a few euros and runs about three hundred steps up a spiral staircase, and it puts you higher than anything in the city except the Eiffel Tower and the Tour Montparnasse.
Come early and walk up the back way through the streets behind the hill instead of straight up the front steps. You’ll pass the vineyard, the last of the windmills and a lot of quiet before you get anywhere near the view.
19. Walk Père Lachaise Under Bare Trees
Père Lachaise opened in 1804 and covers about forty four hectares on a hill in the twentieth arrondissement, which makes it less a cemetery than a small stone city with cobbled avenues and street signs.
Winter suits it. The trees are bare, the light is flat, and the moss on the older tombs goes bright green after rain. It’s also close to empty, apart from a steady trickle of people looking for Jim Morrison.
Chopin, Oscar Wilde and Édith Piaf are all here too. Take a map from the gate or the numbering will defeat you, wear boots because the cobbles get slick, and give it two hours.
What To Know Before Visiting Paris In Winter
The days are short. Around the solstice the sun comes up close to nine and it’s dark again by five, which sounds worse than it is as long as you put the outdoor items in the middle of the day and save the indoor ones for the afternoon.
It’s damp rather than freezing. Highs sit around seven or eight degrees Celsius, mid forties Fahrenheit, and snow is rare enough that it makes the news when it happens. Rain isn’t. Waterproof shoes matter more than a heavy coat.
January and February are the cheapest months of the year for hotels and the gap is a large one. December is not, because of Christmas and New Year.
Some restaurants shut for a fortnight around the New Year, and the big museums close on the first of January and the twenty fifth of December. Worth a quick check before you build a whole day around one of them.
Final Thoughts
Paris in winter asks for a different plan than Paris in June. You go inside more, you eat heavier, and you build the day around light that runs out early.
What you get back is the city without the queue. The Louvre in its quietest month, Notre Dame without a three hour wait, a bench to yourself in front of the Water Lilies. None of that is a consolation prize for coming in the wrong season.
Bring shoes that handle wet cobbles and a coat you can sit down in, book the raclette table before you land, and leave one morning open for whatever the weather decides. The rest of the things to do in Paris will still be there in the rain.
