Housed in a graceful eighteenth-century mansion at 8 Rue d'Anjou in the 8th arrondissement, Restaurant 1728 takes its name from the year the building was raised and weaves that heritage through every detail. The period architecture sets a tone of genuine refinement, with high ceilings, ornate mouldings and the accumulated patina of three centuries of Parisian history. The house once belonged to the Marquis de La Fayette, lending the address a romance that few dining rooms in the city can claim.....

Behind a seventeenth-century facade at 62 Rue Mazarine, in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, the Alcazar hides one of the most surprising interiors in Paris. The site has lived several lives: a royal jeu de paume tennis court in the 1600s, a printer's workshop in the 1700s, and from 1968 a riotous cabaret famous for its transformist revues under Jean-Marie Riviere. In 1998 the British designer Sir Terence Conran reinvented it as a spectacular contemporary brasserie, opening up a vast triple.....

Aquaboulevard is a large urban water park in the fifteenth arrondissement of Paris, billed when it opened as the biggest of its kind in Europe. The project was launched by the city of Paris together with the leisure group Forest Hill and opened in April 1989, inaugurated that May by the mayor, Jacques Chirac. Spread over some seven thousand square metres, its centrepiece is a tropical-themed swimming area kept warm all year, with wave pools, waterfalls, geysers, water cannons, jacuzzis, a giant .....

Often called Cineaqua, the Aquarium de Paris occupies a remarkable spot carved into the hillside of the Trocadero gardens, directly across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower. Its origins are extraordinary: first built for the Universal Exhibition of 1878, it is regarded as the ancestor of all the public aquariums in the world, and it was greatly enlarged for the 1937 exhibition, when it ranked as the largest in Europe. After closing in 1986 the site fell quiet for two decades before a major redevel.....

Standing at the centre of the great star of avenues from which it takes its setting, the Arc de Triomphe is one of the defining monuments of Paris, raised to honour those who fought and died for France in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Napoleon ordered its construction in 1806 after his victory at Austerlitz, but the work dragged on through changes of regime and the arch was not completed until 1836, long after his fall. Designed by Jean-Francois-Therese Chalgrin in a severe neoclassica.....

The studio-museum of Chana Orloff preserves the working home of one of the most accomplished sculptors of the School of Paris, kept much as she left it in a quiet cul-de-sac in the fourteenth arrondissement. Born in Ukraine in 1888 and arriving in Paris as a young woman, Orloff became a celebrated portraitist and sculptor in the lively artistic world of Montparnasse, counting many leading figures of the day among her sitters and friends. In 1926 she commissioned the architect Auguste Perret, a .....

Tethered to the ground by a cable in the Parc Andre Citroen, the Ballon de Paris is a giant helium balloon that lifts passengers high above the southwest of the city for a panoramic view stretching across the rooftops to the Eiffel Tower and beyond. Unlike a hot-air balloon, it does not drift away but rises and descends on its cable from a fixed point in the park, carrying groups of visitors in a circular basket to a height of around one hundred and fifty metres. The balloon dates in its present.....

Few restaurant names evoke the golden age of Parisian nightlife quite like Le Boeuf sur le Toit. Inaugurated in 1922, this Art Deco brasserie and music hall made the whole of fashionable Paris dance through the Roaring Twenties. It was the favourite haunt of Jean Cocteau, whose works still decorate the walls, and a magnet for the era's creative elite, from the painter Francis Picabia to a young Christian Dior and the illustrious Coco Chanel. After Moma Group acquired the institution from Group.....

More than just a restaurant, La Cantine du Faubourg describes itself as an artistic rendezvous and a lifestyle statement set in the heart of the 8th arrondissement. The venue on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore blends seasonal, internationally influenced cooking with a social, see-and-be-seen atmosphere that draws a fashionable Parisian crowd. Its world-food menu reflects the cosmopolitan character of the city, ranging across French, Mediterranean and Asian-inflected dishes designed for sharing ov.....

Far below the streets of the fourteenth arrondissement lies one of the most macabre and unforgettable sights in Paris: the Catacombs, a network of former quarry tunnels lined with the carefully stacked bones of some six million people. The galleries were originally dug to extract the limestone that built much of the city above, and by the eighteenth century the old cemeteries of central Paris had become dangerously overcrowded and unhealthy. The authorities decided to empty them, and from 1786 t.....