Most of what goes wrong at the Palais Garnier goes wrong before anybody walks through a door. People arrive at the wrong side of the building, having bought nothing, expecting to look up at Chagall's ceiling. Three facts fix all of that, and none of them is on the postcard. Paris Opera House self guided tours handle the first two for you.
Quick facts
| Open | Every day, 10am to 5pm — 6pm in summer |
| Last admission | One hour before closing |
| Closed | 1 January, 1 May and 25 December, plus daytime performances |
| Visitors' entrance | Corner of Rue Scribe and Rue Auber, 75009 |
| Adult admission | €25 outside the EEA, €15 inside |
| Under 13 | Free |
| Booking | Online only; the box office sells no visit tickets |
| Time to allow | Ninety minutes |
| Auditorium | Not guaranteed — rehearsals close it without notice |
Tickets: what they cost and where to buy them
Admission is priced by where you live rather than by nationality alone, which almost nothing else in Paris does. An adult from outside the European Economic Area pays €25. An adult who lives inside it pays €15, and is asked for proof of address at the door. Thirteen to twenty-five-year-olds pay €20 and €10 on the same split, and under-13s are free under 13.
Booking is compulsory and it is online. The counters and the machines at the box office do not sell visit tickets at all, so arriving without one means turning around. There are three routes: the Opera's own site, which is cheapest; a resale platform, which is the same admission at the higher adult rate with the booking handled; or inside a guided fare, which is how most guided departures handle it. Visitor information has the full price table.
Which door, and why it matters
The photograph everybody arrives holding is of the wide steps on Place de l'Opéra, 75009 Paris, under the gilded roof groups. That is the performance entrance and it is shut during the day.
Daytime visits go in at the box office at the corner of Rue Scribe and Rue Auber, 75009 Paris, round on the west side. Stand at the bottom of the front steps, walk right along the flank of the building, and the door is on the corner where the two streets meet. It takes two minutes and it is the single most common mistake made here. The map page has the métro exits as well.
Getting there
- Métro Opéra (lines 3, 7 and 8) comes up on the square at the front. Turn right along Rue Scribe.
- Chaussée d'Antin — La Fayette (7 and 9) comes up by the Galeries Lafayette, five minutes north-east.
- Madeleine (8 and 14) is five minutes west along Boulevard des Capucines, and it is the nicer walk.
- RER A, Auber surfaces on Rue Auber itself, which is the visitors' side.
- From Charles de Gaulle, RER B to Châtelet then line 7 or 8; from Orly, line 14 direct to Madeleine. About an hour either way.
What you actually walk through
Eight named spaces, in a fixed order, because the building was designed as a sequence. You come in low under the Rotonde des Abonnés where the carriages once set down, pass the bronze Pythia, and the Grand Staircase opens in front of you: white marble under a thirty-metre well. Then the avant-foyer, then fifty-four metres of Grand Foyer, then the Sun and Moon salons and the Rotonde du Glacier, and finally the Library-Museum in the Emperor's pavilion.
The rooms page takes each one in turn, and the room-by-room post says how long to give each.
The auditorium, and the thing nobody tells you
This matters more here than at most monuments because the auditorium is the room the photographs are of. Chagall's ceiling and the seven tonnes chandelier are behind a box door that may or may not be open on your morning. Everything else is open every day the building is.
How long to allow
Ninety minutes. That is what both the self-guided ticket and the shortest guided departure work to, and it is enough for all eight rooms at a pace that lets you stop. Two hours adds detail rather than rooms. Below an hour you are walking through the staircase and the foyer and calling it a visit, which is a shame given the €25 you paid.
What to bring, and what to leave
- Proof of address if you are claiming the European rate.
- A small bag. The cloakrooms are closed to visitors.
- Not a scooter. They are not allowed in.
- Eight euro for the tablet, or seven if you book it ahead. It is the single most-recommended add-on in the reviews.
Best time to go
Ten o'clock, when the doors open. Almost every complaint travellers make about this building is about crowds, and all of them are describing the middle of the day. In summer the building stays open an hour later, which opens up a late slot that is quieter than mid-afternoon. The seasonal guide goes further on months and hours.
Guided, or on your own?
Both work and they answer different questions. A ticket at $29 gets you into exactly the same rooms as a private guide does; there is no queue to skip and no rope to get past. What a guide adds is commentary, a start time you choose, a party of one to five instead of a crowd, and somebody who can rearrange the ninety minutes when a room shuts. The decision guide does the arithmetic.
What a busy day actually feels like
About 480,000 people come through here every year and they do not arrive evenly. Almost everything travellers say against the building itself comes down to one thing: the rooms after mid-morning. One writes that getting through them was uncomfortable, and that it was hard to hear a private guide over the noise.
The staircase absorbs a crowd because it is enormous. The Grand Foyer does not, because it is a corridor, and the salons at either end are small rooms that four people fill. If you are at the door at ten you get twenty minutes of the building nearly to yourself, and that is the version worth having.
If you only have an hour
It happens, and it is worth doing badly rather than not at all. Skip the Library-Museum, which is a door off the route and easy to miss deliberately. Skip the Sun and Moon salons, which most people miss by accident. Give the Grand Staircase fifteen minutes and the Grand Foyer twenty-five, and let everything else be a corridor you walk through.
What you must not skip is the first four minutes. The Rotonde des Abonnés and the Pythia set up everything that follows, and arriving straight into the staircase from a side door removes the sequence the architect built. The itinerary guide sets out the full version and the short one side by side.
Where a Paris Opera House booking actually goes
Three different transactions get called the same thing, and mixing them up is the other common mistake. A visit ticket is admission to the rooms, sold as a dated slot by the Opera. A guided departure is an operator's product that usually includes that admission and always includes a person. A performance ticket is a seat in the auditorium on an evening, and it is the only one of the three that guarantees you the room with the chandelier in it.
The company page sets out the difference, and the private tours page compares the guided fares against each other.
What is worth combining it with
The Galeries Lafayette and its stained-glass dome are a few minutes up Boulevard Haussmann, and the roof terrace above is free. Place Vendôme is five minutes south, and the Tuileries and the Louvre are a fifteen-minute walk beyond it. One departure here finishes on that roof terrace deliberately.
Ready to pick a way in? Paris Opera House Tours sets every departure side by side with what its fare covers, and the FAQ page answers the rest.
