Budget · 3-hour walk · Paris
Montmartre in three hours
The windmill, the wall of I-love-yous, Picasso's studio, the painters' square, the white basilica and the museum where Renoir painted.
The three-hour route on the islands is Paris at its most monumental; this is the village on the hill that the city swallowed in 1860 and never quite digested. Start at the bottom on the Boulevard de Clichy and climb — it is steep, and there are stairs where the streets give up — to the Sacré-Cœur, then come down the quiet north side where the vineyard is. Go in the morning; by afternoon the Place du Tertre is shoulder to shoulder.
The route, stop by stop
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Moulin Rouge
The red windmill of 1889 on the Boulevard de Clichy, where the cancan still runs twice a night. Look from the pavement and start climbing.
10 min here Walk here → -
Le Mur des je t'aime
"I love you" more than three hundred times in some 250 languages, on 612 tiles of enamelled lava in a small square. The Abbesses métro entrance beside it is one of the two original Guimard glass canopies left in Paris.
10 min here Walk here → -
Le Bateau-Lavoir
Where Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907, in a warren of studios that burned in 1970 and was rebuilt. A shop window with photographs marks the spot.
10 min here Walk here → -
Place du Tertre
The painters' square, full of easels and portraitists. Crowded, touristy and exactly what it has been for a century; coffee on the edge is the way to watch it.
20 min here Walk here → -
Sacré-Cœur
White travertine that bleaches itself in the rain, finished in 1914 and consecrated in 1919. The climb of about three hundred steps into the dome gives the second-highest view in Paris after the Eiffel Tower.
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La Maison Rose
The pink café on the corner of Rue de l'Abreuvoir that Utrillo painted, on the cobbled lane that runs down past the Clos Montmartre vineyard, planted in 1933.
15 min here Walk here → -
Musée de Montmartre
The house where Renoir painted Bal du moulin de la Galette in the garden, with Suzanne Valadon's studio restored as she had it and the vineyard below the windows.
40 min here Walk here →
More in Paris
Every walking route in Paris, or the full Paris guide for where to stay and what a day costs.