Paris on a rainy day: the best indoor things to do 🇫🇷

Rain in Paris is no reason to lose a day — if anything, a grey afternoon is the perfect excuse to step into the city’s greatest interiors. These are the indoor sights that turn bad weather into one of the best parts of your trip.

Head first to the great museums. The Louvre could swallow a whole wet day on its own; pick two or three wings, book a timed slot, and let the crowds outside worry about their umbrellas. Across the river, the Musée d’Orsay gathers the world’s finest Impressionist paintings under a magnificent glass railway-station roof — many visitors love it even more than the Louvre, and it is smaller and easier to do in half a day.

For something shorter and unforgettable, duck into Sainte-Chapelle: a jewel-box chapel wrapped in more than a thousand panels of thirteenth-century stained glass. Even on a dull day the colours glow, and the visit takes only fifteen minutes of pure wonder. Nearby, the restored interior of Notre-Dame is free to enter — reserve a slot and you are straight out of the weather and into one of the great Gothic spaces of Europe.

If the forecast is set in for the day, the Palace of Versailles makes a grand indoor escape, its Hall of Mirrors and state apartments as dazzling as anything in Paris. Between sights, do as Parisians do and shelter in a café or one of the glass-roofed nineteenth-century shopping arcades — the Passage des Panoramas and Galerie Vivienne are dry, atmospheric and made for a slow hot chocolate. A rainy day is also the calmest time to visit the big museums, when the queues that snake around the block in summer all but disappear. Each guide below has opening hours, ticket details and how to reserve, so you can line up a dry, unhurried route from one to the next.