TOUR EIFFEL · 7E ARRONDISSEMENT

The tower was built as the entrance arch for the 1889 Exposition Universelle, the World's Fair marking the centennial of the French Revolution. Gustave Eiffel's engineering firm won a design competition against more than 100 other proposals, though the actual structural design is usually credited to two of his engineers, Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier, with architect Stephen Sauvestre softening the silhouette with its now-famous arches.

It was not universally loved. A group of 300 prominent Parisian artists and writers, including Guy de Maupassant and Charles Gounod, signed a public letter calling it a "useless and monstrous" scar on the city. Eiffel's permit for the tower ran only 20 years, after which it was slated for demolition and the iron sold for scrap. It survived because it turned out to be an excellent radio antenna — the French military used it for wireless telegraphy from 1903, and by the 1910s it was central to French radio and, later, television broadcasting, which made tearing it down impractical.

The tower has its own small wartime legend: in 1940, as German forces approached Paris, French resistance members are said to have cut the lift cables so that occupying officers would have to climb the stairs to raise a swastika flag at the summit — and the parts to fix the lifts were, conveniently, unavailable for the rest of the occupation. Adolf Hitler visited Paris in June 1940 but reportedly did not go up the tower at all.

At 330 metres including its modern broadcast antennas (330m as of the most recent antenna additions; the tower itself, without antennas, tops out around 300m), it was the tallest man-made structure in the world until New York's Chrysler Building overtook it in 1930. It's built almost entirely from puddled wrought iron — not the cast iron often assumed — held together by roughly 2.5 million rivets across around 18,000 individual pieces, all fitted to a precision of a tenth of a millimetre despite being designed decades before computers.

The structure is deliberately light for its size: it weighs about 10,100 tonnes, and the metal alone weighs less than the volume of air directly enclosed by its four legs. Because iron expands with heat, the tower physically grows in summer — sun on one side can also make it lean very slightly away from that face, and the top can shift several centimetres over the course of a hot day. It's repainted roughly every seven years by hand, using around 60 tonnes of a custom bronze-brown paint mixed in three graduated shades so the colour looks uniform from the ground.

There are three public levels. The 1st floor (57m) has a glass floor section, a small history exhibition, and views back toward the Trocadéro. The 2nd floor (115m) is generally considered the best value stop — high enough for a real panorama, low enough that the lift queue and the summit crowd both thin out. The summit (276m) is the only level with 360° views over the whole city, plus a small champagne bar.

As of 2026, official adult (25+) pricing runs from €14.80 for the stairs to the 2nd floor up to €36.70 for the summit by lift; a combined stairs-plus-lift ticket to the summit is €28.00. Note that there is no longer a ticket that lets you walk the stairs the whole way to the top — the stairs only reach the 2nd floor, and the summit is lift-only or via that combo ticket. Reduced rates apply for ages 4–24, and children under 4 go free.

Book online through the official ticket site rather than at the base of the tower: on-site queues regularly run 1.5–3 hours in summer, and walk-up summit tickets frequently sell out entirely. Lift tickets are released up to 60 days ahead of your visit date; stairs tickets are released up to 40 days ahead, and — new for the 2026–27 season — a stairs reservation will also be required from 29 September 2026 onward, closing the last walk-up-friendly option. Prices and exact release windows are adjusted periodically, so always check the official site (linked below) before you budget your day.

Arrive right at opening (9:30am most of the year, 9am in high summer) or after around 9pm, when day-trippers have thinned out and the light is better for photos. Sunset slots for the summit are the most requested of the day and sell out first — if that's the experience you want, book several weeks ahead in peak season (June–August) and at least a week or two ahead the rest of the year.

After dark, the tower sparkles for five minutes at the top of every hour until closing — a separate lighting effect from its steady golden illumination, and one of the few genuinely free Paris spectacles: you don't need a ticket, just a sightline, and the Champ de Mars or the Trocadéro terraces both work well.

The tower has two sit-down restaurants run by the same hospitality group behind several other Paris landmarks. Madame Brasserie, on the 1st floor, serves a French brasserie menu for lunch and dinner and is the more accessible option — booking a table there also gets you into the tower without a separate access ticket. Le Jules Verne, on the 2nd floor, is the fine-dining option with a Michelin star and prices to match; it's normally booked out weeks in advance for dinner, particularly for window tables at sunset.

The closest Métro station is Bir-Hakeim (Line 6), a short walk across the Seine that gives you a classic approach shot of the tower through the ironwork of the elevated railway bridge. RER C stops at Champ de Mars – Tour Eiffel, right at the base. For the postcard view of the whole tower rather than just its base, cross the river to Trocadéro (Métro Line 9), especially in late afternoon light.

The Trocadéro esplanade, directly across the river, is the classic full-tower shot and gets crowded well before sunrise on clear days — arrive 30–45 minutes early for a clear spot at the railing. For a different angle, the Champ de Mars side gives a dramatic near-vertical shot looking straight up through the ironwork, especially effective in the hour after sunset once the tower's lights come on. Rue de l'Université and the nearby Pont de Bir-Hakeim bridge (used in several films) frame the tower through arches and girders rather than shooting it head-on. If you want the tower with genuinely empty foreground — no crowds in the shot — the Champ de Mars lawns in the first hour after opening are usually your best bet, since most visitors head straight to the ticket queues rather than the park.