Churches & Religious Sites — Paris

The 12th-century Gothic cathedral on Île de la Cité, gutted by fire in 2019 and meticulously restored, reopened to the public in December 2024 more luminous than in living memory.

The white travertine basilica crowning Montmartre hill, begun in 1875 as national penance after France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, offers the city's finest free panorama.

A jewel-box royal chapel built in under seven years by King Louis IX to house Christ's Crown of Thorns, its upper level walled almost entirely in 13th-century stained glass.