Louvre Museum
The queue outside I.M. Pei's glass pyramid moves faster than it looks, and the moment you step underground into the Cour Napoléon's inverted light, the scale of the place announces itself. The Louvre covers 60,600 square metres across three wings — Denon, Richelieu, Sully — and holds over 35,000 works on display at any given time.
The building itself predates all of it. Walk down to the basement of the Sully wing and you'll find the stone foundations of a medieval fortress, Philip II's original 12th-century keep still standing in the dark. The museum grew around that core across five centuries before a single painting was hung for the public.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who come back tend to pick one wing and go deep rather than covering ground. The Denon wing on a Wednesday or Friday evening — when the museum stays open until 9 PM — is quieter than any Saturday morning. The Grande Galerie runs nearly 450 metres along the Seine; walk its length once without stopping, then double back to whatever caught your eye.
Deals in Louvre Museum
Book directly at the provider
How Louvre Museum came to be
A fortress stood here from the late 12th century, built under Philip II to anchor Paris's western defences. King Francis I began transforming it into a royal palace in 1546, appointing architect Pierre Lescot to oversee the Renaissance rebuilding. Louis XIII and Louis XIV continued adding to it through the 17th century, with Claude Perrault designing the grand East Colonnade. When Louis XIV moved the court to Versailles in 1682, the palace slowly emptied.
On August 10, 1793 — four years into the Revolution — it opened as the Musée Central des Arts with 537 paintings. Napoleon renamed it the Musée Napoléon, poured in conquered works from across Europe, and appointed Dominique Vivant Denon to organise them. After his fall in 1814, nearly 5,000 works were returned to their countries of origin. The Grand Louvre renovation of the 1980s and 90s, which produced Pei's pyramid (opened May 30, 1989) and reclaimed the former finance ministry wing, was the first time the entire palace was given over entirely to the museum.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.