The Most Beautiful Squares, Streets and Monuments in Île-de-France
7 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful squares, streets and monuments in Île-de-France are Place de la Concorde, Eiffel Tower and Galerie Vivienne. The list covers 7 squares, streets and monuments. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Paris owes its great squares and monuments to centuries of rulers who saw the city as a stage. Kings laid out royal squares framed by uniform facades, Napoleon raised triumphal monuments, and the nineteenth century cut long avenues and vistas that tie them together, so a single walk can link sites from four centuries. Covered passages, a temple of great men and an iron tower complete a city where public space was designed as carefully as any palace.
The Place des Vosges, inaugurated in 1612 as the Place Royale, is the oldest planned square in Paris, enclosed by red-brick houses over arcades. Place Vendôme, designed by Jules Hardouin-Mansart, wraps an octagon of stately facades around a column cast from cannon taken at Austerlitz. The Place de la Concorde, the largest square in the city, is centred on an Egyptian obelisk from the temple of Luxor.
At the top of the Champs-Élysées, the Arc de Triomphe, ordered by Napoleon in 1806, shelters the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier where twelve avenues meet. The Panthéon, begun as a church on the hill of Sainte-Geneviève, became the resting place of the nation's great figures. The Galerie Vivienne, a covered passage from the 1820s, has a glass roof and mosaic floors, and the Eiffel Tower, built for the 1889 World's Fair, still marks the city skyline.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Place de la Concorde | Square | |
| 2 | Eiffel Tower | Observation tower | ✓ |
| 3 | Galerie Vivienne | Covered passageway | |
| 4 | Panthéon | Monument | |
| 5 | Place Vendôme | Square | |
| 6 | Place des Vosges | Square | |
| 7 | Arc de Triomphe | Triumphal arch |
01 Place de la Concorde
France · 2.5 km from Paris48.866° N 2.321° E
Image by westcoast_dave from Pixabay The Revolution gave the square its darkest chapter. The king's statue was pulled down in 1792 and melted, the square was renamed Place de la Révolution, and the guillotine was set up here. Louis XVI was executed on the square in January 1793 and Marie Antoinette that October; Danton, Lavoisier and Robespierre followed. Of about 2,500 people guillotined in Paris during the Revolution, some 1,100 died here.
02 Eiffel Tower
Tour Eiffel
France · 4.3 km from Paris48.858° N 2.294° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by TheDigitalArtist from Pixabay What made the design work — visually, not structurally — was a third man: architect Stephen Sauvestre, brought in to soften the raw lattice engineering into something the public might actually love.
Did you know? It was the tallest human-made structure on Earth for 41 years, until New York's Chrysler Building was completed in 1930.
03 Galerie Vivienne
France · 1.4 km from Paris48.867° N 2.340° E
Mbzt · CC BY 3.0 It was built in 1823 for Marchoux, president of the Chamber of Notaries, on the site of an old town house, to plans by the architect Delannoy, and opened in 1826 under its founder's name before taking the name of the street it opens onto.
Did you know? The floor and reliefs use emblems of commerce such as caducei, anchors, cornucopias, laurel wreaths and sheaves of wheat.
04 Panthéon
France · 1.4 km from Paris48.846° N 2.346° E
Image by ChiemSeherin from Pixabay The building is an early and very pure statement of Neoclassicism: a Greek-cross plan, a portico of Corinthian columns copied from a temple, and a stone dome meant to rival St Peter's in Rome and St Paul's in London. It is 110 metres long and 83 metres high, and the dome is really three shells fitted one inside another; through the opening in the lowest you see Antoine-Jean Gros's painted Apotheosis of Saint Genevieve on the second.
05 Place Vendôme
France · 2 km from Paris48.867° N 2.329° E
Duplessi-Bertaux, Jean (1747-1818) · CC0 At its centre stood François Girardon's equestrian statue of Louis XIV, unveiled in 1699 and believed to be the first large modern equestrian statue cast in one piece; the Revolution pulled it down in 1792. Napoleon replaced it between 1806 and 1810 with the Vendôme Column, about 44 metres high, wrapped in a spiral of 425 bronze relief plates cast from cannon captured from the armies of Europe. It has had a life of its own.
06 Place des Vosges
France · 1 km from Paris48.856° N 2.366° E
Image by beanitwoman from Pixabay The architecture is what makes the square sing. The facades are of red brick framed by pale stone quoins, above ground-floor arcades carried on square pillars, and topped with steep slate roofs pierced by dormers. The uniformity is broken only by two taller pavilions facing each other across the garden — the Pavillon du Roi and the Pavillon de la Reine.
Did you know? The open centre was once a venue for duels, and the Count of Montmorency-Bouteville fought a famous one here in 1627 in defiance of a royal ban.
07 Arc de Triomphe
Arc de triomphe de l'Étoile
France · 4.6 km from Paris48.874° N 2.295° E
ZeusUpsistos · CC BY-SA 4.0 Napoleon ordered the arch in 1806, after Austerlitz, to honour the armies of the Revolution and the Empire. Jean-François Chalgrin designed it on the model of the Arch of Titus in Rome, but the foundations alone took two years, Chalgrin died in 1811, and work stalled under the restored Bourbons. It was finally finished under Louis-Philippe and inaugurated in 1836.
Did you know? The Unknown Soldier was originally meant to rest in the Panthéon, but a public letter-writing campaign brought him to the arch instead.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful squares, streets and monuments in Île-de-France?
- On our list, Place de la Concorde ranks first, followed by Eiffel Tower and Galerie Vivienne.
- What is the oldest square in Paris?
- The Place des Vosges, inaugurated in 1612 as the Place Royale, is the oldest planned square in Paris. Its houses follow one design of red brick and stone over a continuous arcade.
- How old is the obelisk on the Place de la Concorde?
- The Luxor Obelisk is more than three thousand years old and once stood at the entrance to the temple of Luxor, carved with inscriptions of Ramesses II. Egypt gave it to France, and it was erected in Paris in 1836.
- Who is buried in the Panthéon in Paris?
- The Panthéon holds the remains of figures honoured by the French nation, among them Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola and Marie Curie.
- How many squares, streets and monuments are on this list in Île-de-France?
- The list covers 7 squares, streets and monuments.