Notre-Dame de Paris

Bishop Maurice de Sully tore down the older cathedral on the Île de la Cité around 1160 and started again at a far larger scale. The first stone was laid in the spring of 1163, in the presence of King Louis VII and Pope Alexander III, and the high altar was consecrated in 1182. The master builders of the early phases are anonymous, but later names survive: Jean de Chelles gave the north transept its portal and rose in the late 1240s, and Pierre de Montreuil did the same for the south transept from 1258. Work went on in stages until the mid-14th century, which is why the building reads as a textbook of French Gothic in motion, from the early rib vaults and flying buttresses to the thin, glass-heavy Rayonnant transept façades.

The west front is the part most people know: two towers 69 metres high, built between 1220 and 1250, with the north tower visibly a little bulkier than the south. Above the portals sits the oldest of the three roses, about 9.6 metres across and entirely re-glazed in the 19th century; the south transept rose, a gift of Louis IX, is nearly 13 metres wide. Much of what gives the exterior its character is later. After the Revolution stripped the cathedral of bronze, lead and statuary and turned it briefly into a Temple of Reason, the building decayed badly enough for demolition to be discussed. Victor Hugo's 1831 novel helped change the mood, and from 1844 Jean-Baptiste Lassus and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc restored it, adding the spire over the crossing and the gallery of chimeras that look down over the city.

On 15 April 2019 fire destroyed most of the roof and Viollet-le-Duc's spire. The stone vaults largely held, and the façade, towers and rose windows survived. The roof was rebuilt in oak from French forests, and a new spire went up in December 2023 following the 19th-century design. Inside, the cleaned limestone is strikingly pale compared with the grey many visitors remember. The building belongs to the French state and is used by the Catholic Church as the seat of the Archbishop of Paris. On the square in front, a marker set into the paving has served since 1924 as the zero point from which distances on French roads are measured.

Getting there

The cathedral stands in the very centre of Paris, about 0.1 km from the city's reference point, on the Île de la Cité in the Seine. Paris-Orly Airport (ORY) is about 14 km away in a straight line. The island is linked to both banks of the river by bridges, and the cathedral is easily reached on foot from the surrounding central districts.