Mid-range · 6-hour walk · Paris
The Marais and Père Lachaise in six hours
The oldest square in Paris, the free museum of the city's history, falafel on Rue des Rosiers, the Picasso museum and the cemetery where everyone is.
The Louvre route is the Paris of kings; this is the Paris of everyone else. The Marais survived Haussmann almost untouched, so its streets are still medieval and its mansions still aristocratic, and the Jewish quarter at its heart still keeps Saturday. The afternoon walks east to Père Lachaise, which is less a cemetery than a hillside city of the dead with Chopin, Piaf and Oscar Wilde among its residents.
The route, stop by stop
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Place des Vosges
Laid out in 1612 and the oldest planned square in Paris: thirty-six red-brick houses round a garden, with Victor Hugo's apartment in the south-east corner, free to visit.
30 min here Walk here → -
Musée Carnavalet
The history of Paris in two Marais mansions, free, from Neolithic canoes to Proust's cork-lined bedroom and the shop signs of the old city.
60 min here Walk here → -
Rue des Rosiers
Early lunch in the old Jewish quarter. The falafel queue outside L'As du Fallafel moves faster than it looks; take it to the Jardin des Rosiers behind the street.
45 min here Walk here → -
Musée Picasso Paris
The largest public collection of Picasso's work anywhere, left to France in lieu of inheritance tax, in a 17th-century salt-tax collector's mansion.
75 min here Walk here → -
Père Lachaise Cemetery
Half an hour east. Seventy thousand tombs on a wooded hill; pick up a map at the gate, because Jim Morrison, Chopin, Piaf and Oscar Wilde — behind glass since 2011, to stop the lipstick — are all in different corners.
More in Paris
Every walking route in Paris, or the full Paris guide for where to stay and what a day costs.