This guide covers three places on the Right Bank and the tip of the Île de la Cité that you can link in one walk along the Seine: the Petit Palais, the Louvre and the Pont Neuf. Each shows a different side of Paris: a royal fortress turned into the world's most visited museum, a palace of art built for the 1900 World's Fair, and the bridge that, despite its name, is the oldest standing crossing of the Seine in the city.

The Louvre

The Louvre began as a fortress. King Philip II Augustus built it in the late 12th century to protect Paris from attack from the west, and the remains of its walls and keep can still be seen in the basement of the museum. Over the following centuries the kings of France turned the fortress into a palace and kept extending it, until the building enclosed the square Cour Carrée and stretched in long wings along the river.

The palace became a public museum during the Revolution: it opened on 10 August 1793 as the Muséum central des Arts de la République, with 537 paintings and 184 objects of art. Today it is ranked as the most visited museum in the world. Its glass pyramid, designed by the architect I. M. Pei, was inaugurated in 1988 and the underground hall beneath it opened in 1989; criticised at first, it is now the main entrance and one of the best-known modern buildings in Paris.

The museum has had its dramas. In 1911 the Mona Lisa was stolen by Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian who had worked at the Louvre, and it was only recovered in Florence in 1913. On 19 October 2025 thieves took eight pieces of the French crown jewels from the Galerie d'Apollon in a few minutes; the gallery reopened in July 2026. A large redevelopment, with a new entrance on the colonnade side and a separate room for the Mona Lisa, is planned for the coming years, so check what is open before you go. The Louvre is one of the stops on our Paris scavenger hunt.

The medieval Louvre in the basement, where the moat and the base of Philip Augustus's towers have been uncovered.
The Winged Victory of Samothrace, the Greek statue of the goddess of victory that has stood at the top of the Daru staircase since 1883.
The Venus de Milo in the Greek, Etruscan and Roman galleries.
Outside, the Cour Carrée, the oldest part of the palace above ground, and the view from the pyramid courtyard along the axis towards the Tuileries Garden.

The Petit Palais

The Petit Palais was built for the Exposition Universelle of 1900, the World's Fair that also gave Paris the Grand Palais opposite and the Pont Alexandre III nearby. The architect Charles Girault designed it in the Beaux-Arts style as four wings around a semicircular garden. Construction started in October 1897 and finished in April 1900, and in 1902 the building became the City of Paris Museum of Fine Arts.

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The collection runs from Greek and Roman antiquities and Christian icons to medieval and Renaissance works, 18th-century furniture and paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, Fragonard, Delacroix, Monet and Cézanne. The building itself is the other attraction: its decoration took more than twenty years, from 1903 to 1925, with murals by Albert Besnard in the entrance lobby and a cupola painted by Maurice Denis after the First World War. The Petit Palais is one of the stops on our Paris scavenger hunt.

The main gate, designed by Girault himself, and the wrought-iron banisters of the staircases in the entrance rotunda.
The mosaic floors laid by the Italian artist Facchina in the galleries, and the stained-glass windows of the entrance rotunda.
The semicircular garden, framed by a peristyle with columns of pink granite and a vault painted with the seasons; it was designed as a quiet place away from the crowds of the World's Fair.

The Pont Neuf

Despite its name, the "New Bridge" is the oldest standing bridge across the Seine in Paris. King Henri III laid its first stone on 31 May 1578, and the bridge was finished in 1606 and inaugurated by Henri IV in 1607. It crosses the western tip of the Île de la Cité in two parts, with five arches to the Left Bank and seven to the Right Bank, twelve in all.

It was new in more ways than one. It was the first stone bridge in Paris built without houses on it, as Henri IV did not want them to block the view of the Louvre, and it had raised pavements to protect people on foot from mud and horses. In 1985 the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped the whole bridge in fabric, and a major restoration ran from 1994 to 2007, in time for its 400th anniversary. The Pont Neuf is one of the stops on our Paris scavenger hunt.

The 381 stone masks, the mascarons, under the cornice: faces of forest and field gods, satyrs and sylvans, copies of originals attributed to the sculptor Germain Pilon.
The equestrian statue of Henri IV in the middle of the bridge. The original of 1614 was destroyed in 1792 during the Revolution; the present statue was installed in 1818, cast in bronze from a melted statue of General Desaix.
The Square du Vert-Galant, the small park at the tip of the island below the statue, named after Henri IV's nickname, the "Green Gallant".
Place Dauphine, the triangular square just behind the bridge on the island.

How to see them in one walk

Start at the Petit Palais on Avenue Winston-Churchill, close to the Champs-Élysées. From there walk east along the Seine or through the Tuileries Garden to the Louvre, entering the courtyard of the pyramid. After the museum, continue along the river past the Cour Carrée to the Pont Neuf, and walk down to the Square du Vert-Galant at the tip of the island to end the walk at water level, ideally towards sunset, when the light falls along the river.

See Paris with World City Trail

Our Paris scavenger hunt turns the city centre into a game you play on your phone. The route links 10 stops, from the Eiffel Tower to Notre-Dame, and the Petit Palais, the Louvre and the Pont Neuf from this guide are all stops, along with the Pont de l'Alma, the Pont Alexandre III, Place de la Concorde, the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Conciergerie. At each stop you solve a puzzle and learn a story, at your own pace.

There is also a self-guided walking tour and an outdoor escape game in Paris, for people who prefer a different format.

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Facts checked in October 2026.

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