Paris Honeymoon

Why Paris Honeymoon works

Paris is the capital and largest city of France, with an estimated city population of 2.04 million as of January 2026 within an area of 105.4 square kilometres, and a metropolitan population of 13.3 million as of 2023. It sits on the river Seine in the centre of the Île-de-France region and is nicknamed the "City of Light," partly for its role in the Age of Enlightenment. Administratively the city is divided into twenty arrondissements, each with its own character, a layout created during Haussmann's nineteenth-century renovation of new boulevards, parks, and public works that turned Paris into what became known as the "capital of the 19th century."

The Parisii people inhabited the area from around the middle of the 3rd century BC, trading along a north–south route that crossed the Seine at the Île de la Cité; Julius Caesar conquered the Paris Basin for Rome in 52 BC, founding the settlement of Lutetia on the Left Bank, which grew into a city with a forum, baths, temples, and an amphitheatre. By the end of the Western Roman Empire the town was known as Parisius, the source of the modern name. Centuries later, in the summer of 1789, Paris became the centre of the French Revolution: on 14 July a mob seized weapons from the Invalides and stormed the Bastille, and the city's first independent council, the Paris Commune, met at the Hôtel de Ville to elect the astronomer Jean Sylvain Bailly as mayor.

Paris's islands in the Seine, the Île Saint-Louis and the larger Île de la Cité, form the oldest part of the city, and its highest hill, Montmartre, rises to 130 metres. In 2022 the city's leading cultural attractions were the Louvre Museum, with 7.7 million visitors, followed by the Eiffel Tower with 5.8 million, the Musée d'Orsay with 3.27 million, and the Centre Pompidou with 3 million. Since the late eighteenth century Paris has also been known for its restaurants and haute cuisine, a tradition that began with La Taverne Anglaise, opened in 1786 in the arcades of the Palais-Royal, and continued through Belle Époque houses such as Maxim's on Rue Royale and the Tour d'Argent on the Quai de la Tournelle; the city today counts more than 9,000 restaurants, drawing on nearly every French regional cuisine and much of the world's, judged since 1900 by the Michelin Guide.

Paris has an oceanic climate with cool winters and warm summers, averaging between 15 and 25°C in July, and a few days each year above 32°C; longer heat waves occur occasionally, such as in 2003, when temperatures exceeded 30°C for weeks and reached 40°C on some days. Spring and autumn are generally mild by day and cool at night but changeable, while winter brings scarce sunshine, cool days, and nights that stay mostly above freezing, with light frosts common but temperatures rarely dipping below −5°C; occasional light snow or flurries occur without much accumulation. Average annual precipitation is 641 millimetres, spread fairly evenly through the year, and summer days average about eight hours of sunshine.

As of 2024, Paris had been ranked the most attractive city in the world for four years running by the Euromonitor Global Cities Destination Index, and Greater Paris received a record 38 million visitors in 2019 measured by hotel arrivals, including 12.2 million French visitors and, among foreign arrivals, the largest numbers from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and China. That year Greater Paris counted 2,056 hotels, including 94 five-star properties, totalling 121,646 rooms, alongside 60,000 homes registered with Airbnb. In 2018, Paris was the world's second-busiest airline destination with 19.10 million visitors, behind only Bangkok, and tourism-related sectors such as hotels, catering, transport, and leisure employed 393,008 workers across Greater Paris in 2016, about 12.4 percent of the region's total workforce.

• Paris — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Text adapted from the linked articles under CC BY-SA 4.0; edited for length.

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