Free things to do in Paris: a local's list
By The Souvenirs team
Souvenirs editorial
Published 17 August 2026 · 5 min read
Paris has a reputation for being expensive, and the ticketed version of it is. But the city's best hours — the markets, the parks, the river, the light on the buildings — have never had a price on them.
This is the list we'd give a friend arriving with an empty wallet: what is genuinely free, what is free on certain days, and which of it is actually worth your afternoon.
The museums that are always free
Paris runs its own municipal museums, and their permanent collections cost nothing, all year, to everyone. This is the single most underused fact about the city.
The Musée Carnavalet tells the history of Paris itself across two mansions in the Marais. The Petit Palais holds a serious fine-art collection in a building from the 1900 World's Fair. The Maison de Victor Hugo sits on the Place des Vosges, in the apartment he lived in.
Tips
- Free applies to the permanent collections — temporary exhibitions are usually ticketed
- The Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris is the quietest of the big free ones
Pro tip
If you only do one, make it the Carnavalet. Walking the city afterwards is a different experience when you know what used to stand where.
The museums that are free some of the time
Several national museums open their doors free on the first Sunday of the month, and some run free evenings. It is genuinely worth having, but the schemes change, so treat it as a bonus rather than a plan.
Check the museum's own site the week you travel. A first Sunday is also the busiest day that museum will have all month, which is a real trade.
Tips
- Under-26 residents of the EU get in free to most national museums year-round
- Free days draw queues — arrive at opening or go late
The parks, which are the actual attraction
The Jardin du Luxembourg is the one everyone names, and rightly: chairs you can drag wherever you like, a pond with model boats, and the Senate at one end. The Tuileries does the same job between the Louvre and the Concorde.
Go further out for the better ones. Parc des Buttes-Chaumont is built into a quarry, with cliffs, a lake and a temple on a rock. Parc Monceau is smaller and more elegant. Both are full of Parisians and nearly empty of visitors.
Tips
- The green metal chairs in the Luxembourg are free and movable — take one to the water
- Buttes-Chaumont is steep; the views are at the top and worth the climb
Churches, which are free and enormous
Almost every church in Paris is free to enter, and several of them are among the finest buildings in Europe. Saint-Sulpice is nearly the size of Notre-Dame and usually near-empty. Saint-Eustache, by Les Halles, has an organ used for free recitals.
Saint-Germain-des-Prés is the oldest church in the city. The Panthéon and Sainte-Chapelle are the two that charge — everything else on this list does not.
Tips
- Free organ recitals are common on Sunday afternoons — check the boards by the door
- Cover your shoulders in summer or you may be turned away
Markets, for the price of lunch
Walking a Paris market costs nothing and is the closest thing to seeing how the city actually eats. Marché d'Aligre is the best of them: a covered hall, an open-air street market and a flea market, all in one square.
Rue Mouffetard runs downhill through the 5th and is a market street rather than a market. The Marché des Enfants Rouges in the Marais is the oldest covered market in the city, from 1615.
Tips
- Most markets are closed Mondays and finish by early afternoon
- Lunch from three stalls costs less than one sit-down starter
Père-Lachaise, which is a park with graves in it
Free, enormous, and on a hill with cobbled avenues under old trees. Most visitors come for the famous names — Wilde, Chopin, Morrison — and spend an hour hunting them with a phone in hand.
The better use of an afternoon is to take the map at the gate and then ignore it: walk the avenues, look at the nineteenth-century tombs, and let the famous ones turn up on their own.
Tips
- Take the paper map at the main entrance — phone signal is poor inside
- The eastern, higher part is the quietest and the most overgrown
Views that cost nothing
The paid viewpoints have queues and price tags; the free ones mostly do not. The steps below Sacré-Cœur face west over the whole city. Parc de Belleville is higher than people expect and has almost no visitors.
The rooftop terrace at Galeries Lafayette is free and looks straight at the Opéra and the Eiffel Tower. So is the roof at Printemps next door.
Tips
- Department-store roofs close earlier than the shops — check before you go up
- Belleville at sunset is the local alternative to the Sacré-Cœur steps
Pro tip
The one paid view genuinely worth it is Montparnasse, for the simple reason that it is the only skyline view with the Eiffel Tower in it.
The river, end to end
The Seine's banks are UNESCO-listed and long stretches are closed to cars. You can walk from the Marais to the Eiffel Tower almost entirely at water level, past the bouquinistes, under the bridges, with the city above you.
Do it at dusk. It is the single best free hour in Paris, and if you collected along the way, the app has the proof.
Tips
- The Right Bank walkway is longer; the Left Bank is quieter
- Île Saint-Louis is a two-minute detour and worth it every time
Paris is expensive if you buy the version on the posters. Walked instead — through the free museums, the parks, the markets and the river at dusk — it is one of the cheapest great cities in Europe, and a much better one than the ticketed version.
