What are the best places to visit for a short trip to Paris, France?
Three days is a very short time for a place as big and filled with “must see” sights as Paris. However, Paris is a very compact city and has the best public transport in the world so you can actually see quite a lot if you plan your itinerary carefully. You’ll have to skup most of the museums and, at best, do a quick run thru the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa, Winged Victory and a few other mega-masterpieces. You can leave the rest for your next trip(s) to Paris. February can be quite chilly with daytime temperatures in the mid 40’s and dipping towards freezing at night. Snow and rain are both real possibilities. So weather will also put something of a crimp on your sightseeing. When you say three days do you mean three full days or are you counting the day you arrive and the day you leave? I’m going to assume, just to play it safe, that you mean the latter and therefore figure you have two half days and one full day in the middle. If I’m wrong then please let me know. After you’re settl
When I take someone for a first visit to Paris, I usually take the person to the Visitparis doubledecker buses in Rue de Rivoli. They organise multilingual tours in Paris and you have a choice of one or two-days visits. I usually choose a half-day visit that spans most monuments so that we can have a glimpse of nearly everything (see the other answers), than we can decide whether we want to stay longer or come back later and visit more thoroughly (using the underground system). My children particularly loved the Pompidou Centre and the City of Arts and Industry at La Villette, the Invalids Palace with Napoleon’s tomb, my wife loves the Halles, where she “shops till she drops”. Being interested in aviation, I love the Bourget aviation museum and I thought the maritime museum in the Trocadero was absolute top; but I understand it is closed for repairs. There is an interesting museum at the CNAM (Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers) but it has been under renovation for so many year
