Notre-Dame cathedral (how-to)
Who visits Paris for the first time and is not interested in visiting the world famous Notre-Dame cathedral?
No one that I can think of...
And that demand has increased since it reopened in December 2024 after the 2019 fire.
But, do I have bad news for you: unless you book your inside visit of Notre-Dame at least 5 months in advance, no proper travel agent can provide you with a guided tour inside anymore because, since July 2026,
the bishopric of Notre-Dame has decided that guided tours for individuals (5 people or less), which were not regulated before (we used to just walk in and quietly do our thing), now need a booking in order to have an authorization to speak inside the cathedral… The official reason behind this decision is that they want to reduce the noise inside the cathedral, which would indeed be a noble quest… if only it worked. It doesn’t (and never will).
The main reason is that Notre-Dame is, like Mona Lisa, famous because it’s famous, and 90% of the visitors don’t come to pray or worship at all: they just want to see that world famous monument which they have been unanimously told is unique, which survived a fire (which most of them saw happen live on TV) and which
“came back to life” with free massive universal publicity . And it's a sad reality that those people (not you, dear)
don’t know how to behave anymore, whether they are inside a religious place or even a museum...
Otherwise, you may have rightfully heard that free skip-the-line-time-slot tickets can officially
potentially be found online 48 hours maximum in advance on Notre-Dame's official website.
That's true, but that only works with the help of God Himself and if you make the right click
when planets are well aligned… Here is the link if you want to give it a try:
https://www.notredamedeparis.fr/en/visit/reservation/
In order to learn a lot more about this cathedral and its restorations,
I highly recommend that you click on my gothic link.
And if you want to know more about Viollet-le-Duc, the chief architect
who supervized the restorations in the 19th Century, please clich here!
Anyway, whether the Church likes it or not (and it doesn't), Notre-Dame has now become a tourist attraction
comparable to the Catacombs or the Eiffel Tower where travel agencies have all their staff (and/or bots) online, each on a computer, to secure a maximum of tickets for a maximum of days on the very minute that they are put on the market. So sad for me (and hundreds of my colleagues) who have given thousands of tours previously inside
(and have therefore become experts at it) and who are now limited to one or two visits at best per trimester…
And not only do we have to deal with the frustration of not being able to perform a visit we’re good at,
we also have to suffer from a big loss of income because a lot of tours are cancelled as we can no longer give clients what they expect. And things have gotten so complicated: I was in front of my computer on 21st of July 2026
(I was “lucky” not to be working on that day in order to be able to do that) and I was able to secure one time-slot
in December because I had clients who booked me 6 months in advance. So I will guide inside the cathedral once this trimester. Yay! But I’m not even looking forward to it anymore. Because, when we arrive, I will have to abandon my clients for 10 mn in order to go to a small street North of Notre-Dame to get their prepaid official headsets.
We can’t bring our own because the headsets are an easy way for their security personnel to know if we’re
“legit” or not inside they say (a professional guiding card is not good enough for them). And, if we don’t have
those headsets, we get evicted from the Cathedral like thieves… After that, our explanation time is limited to 30 mn outside and one hour maximum inside. And if we bring the headsets back late, they can ban us for good in the future… And, on top of that, we are interrupted inside the Cathedral every 5 to 10 mn by loud announcements on their speakers saying “silence please” in several languages. It’s not a church anymore: it sounds like a train station!
Indeed, it’s not any quieter since this new measure of limited number of guided tours because a lot of tourists
are poorly educated and talk loudly between themselves or on their phones. Notre-Dame would want people
to walk silently on their own at a steady pace with a respectful attitude, but Notre-Dame is for most people
just an Instagramable touristic attraction with souvenir-medal vending machines inside and a gift shop at the exit.
And let it be said that mass tourism doesn’t necessarily generate tourists for mass!
(this is an important read!)
Notre-Dame has always been a very popular attraction and it was until recently always included
by Tour Operators in their bus tour of Paris because it's famous, central and the visit is free.
That’s how it became Paris’ most visited monument: 11 million visitors in 2025 they say, with peaks around
35,000 visitors a day (those numbers are similar to the Louvre; and they are in fact the same visitors too).
Now, it's still officially free to visit the cathedral but, if you’re a couple and you want your private guide
to tell you inside the church about gothic architecture and/or comment on what’s visible inside, they now force us to rent THEIR mike and two headsets for the modic sum of 25€… If it was only that, it wouldn’t really be a problem because, if you can afford to have a private guide, chances are you can also afford an extra 25€
for this visit to happen. The problem is that they now limit the allowed number of guided tours
to around 20 per day (except Sundays of course, or during mass, where there is none allowed)
while the demand is at least ten times bigger… What’s even more horrible is that Notre-Dame’s website
now puts on sale all one trimester’s time-slots on a particular date and all the time-slots for the whole trimester are sold out in less time than you take in reading this page! Bookings for October-November-December 2026 were put on sale on July 21st at 2:30 PM. At 3 PM they were all gone!!! That only helps big online travel agents who use their bots to buy the majority of these time-slots (they know that they’ll find tourists to sell them to
at a high price at the last minute) and that leaves hundreds of individual guides like me stranded...
Three men are wearing hats inside the cathedral on this picture taken in June 2026. They shouldn't.
They are being told to remove them at the entrance but they mechanically put them back on afterwards. As if they cared... 🙄
And the result of all this is that giving a guided tour inside this cathedral has now become as difficult, unpleasant
and frustrating as can be and, to tell you the truth, I'm so put off that I sadly don’t care anymore if I ever guide inside this Cathedral again… There are so many other churches that are so much more worthwhile and authentic!
Just cross the Seine river and you find an interesting small church, Saint-Severin (where I’ll bring you to as well),
where you can visit quietly and where you can properly commune with yourself for a moment if you want to do that.
So now you know: if you book me less than 5 months in advance (that’s the majority of you) for a visit of the Cathedral, what we now offer is an outside visit. But it's still totally worth it because there's so much to say
about the novelty and the different steps of its construction, about the façade, the doorways, the flying buttresses; not to mention the latest scandals about the stained glass + what you won't read in the news (like who's responsible for the fire and why he won't be bothered by the authorities…😎). And honestly, from the outside, I can easily tell you as much as I want about the inside. I can show you pictures of what you will see inside and what’s not to be missed (we can find a bench in the shade in a nearby park for that) and, after that, either you go in by yourself (and I deduct one hour of my services during which I can happily read a book on that same bench or at a café) or I go inside with you to point at things; but I will not open my mouth (because I was rudely evicted once and that’s enough for me).
Now, of course there will be a line to go inside...
Notre-Dame during mass; June 2026.
That being said, 95% of people who attend mass are tourists (including French tourists, and there's a lot of them). Because there are very few people who live on the island itself; and Parisians, if they want to go to church,
they'll prefer one near where they live and, if they want to concentrate on their prayers, they will choose
any other church but this one which is like a noisy overcrowded picture-taking human zoo inside...
Crown of Thorns "worshippers". August 2026. No comment...
... but it’s mostly a line for the inevitable security check (which you find at all tourist sites) and,
even though the line can sometimes be long (mostly between 10 AM and 5 PM, much less before or after that),
it typically moves fairly fast. I’ve never spent more than 15 minutes
in that line and that’s perfect enough time to tell you about the façade anyway!
August 2026. Can you tell that it's moving fast on the right hand side of this picture?