Paris Opera House Map, Entrances and Meeting Points

Nobody has trouble finding this building. What people get wrong is which side of it to stand on. One traveller's review describes an hour spent walking round it in the rain, looking for a guide. Five operators use four different streets inside a two-hundred-metre square. Paris Opera House guided tours each name their own corner, and this page puts them on the ground.

The visitors' entrance is not the front steps

The photograph everyone arrives holding is of the south front on Place de l'Opéra, 75009 Paris — the wide steps 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, on the west corner. Stand at the bottom of the grand steps and look up at the building. Now walk right, along the side. The door is on the corner where the two streets meet, two minutes away, and this is the single most useful thing to know before you arrive.

Getting off the métro at the right exit

Three métro stations, an RER station and a dozen bus routes reach this corner. The station is not the problem; the exit is.

The five meeting points, street by street

Each operator names its own spot and they are all different. This is what each one says, in the order the fares run from lowest to highest.

• Corner of Rue Scribe and Rue Auber — The entrance is at the corner of Scribe and Auber streets.
• Le Relais Paris Opéra, 1 Rue Auber — We'll meet at the café Le Relais Paris Opéra, rue Auber, next to the Opéra Garnier.
• Café de la Paix, 5 Place de l'Opéra — No written instruction; the meeting point is recorded as Café de la Paix, 5 Place de l'Opéra. The tour ends on the rooftop of Galeries Lafayette, 21 Boulevard Haussmann.
• 1 Rue Auber — Meet your guide at 1 rue Auber, 75009.
• 9 Rue Scribe — We will meet each other next to the Perfume Museum, at 9 Rue Scribe, Paris.
• Place de l'Opéra — We meet in front of the main staircase of Opera Garnier.

Two of them are cafes on the same square, and they are not the same cafe. The Café de la Paix sits on the Place de l'Opéra itself, at the corner with the Boulevard des Capucines. Le Relais Paris Opéra is round on Rue Auber. Fifty metres apart, and one reviewer's whole afternoon turned on it.

The route inside, in the order the rooms come

Once you are through the door the building decides your route, because it was designed as a sequence.

1. La Rotonde des Abonnés — the subscribers' rotunda under the staircase, where the carriages once set down
2. The Pythia basin — the bronze Pythia coiled with snakes at the foot of the ramp
3. The Grand Staircase — white marble, a 30 metres-high well, and two flights that split so the room can watch itself arrive
4. The avant-foyer — the low mosaic-vaulted room you cross before the doors open
5. The Grand Foyer — 54 metres long, 13 metres wide and 18 metres high, gilded end to end
6. The Sun and Moon salons — the two round rooms at either end of the foyer
7. La Rotonde du Glacier — the ice-cream rotunda, hung with its tapestries
8. The Library-Museum — the Opera's own collection, in the Emperor's pavilion

The rooms page takes each of these one at a time.

Why four streets and not one

Operators do not choose a meeting point for the visitor's convenience. They choose one they can find in a crowd. It needs somewhere to stand out of the rain. And it needs to be far enough from the ticket door not to be swallowed by the queue. That is why nobody meets at the entrance itself, which is the spot every visitor assumes.

Arriving early at the wrong corner feels exactly like arriving on time at the right one, right up until it does not. So read the meeting instruction on your booking rather than the address. The two are often different. One operator gives an address on Rue Auber and an instruction naming a cafe on it. Another gives a square, and an instruction naming a staircase inside the building.

If you have twenty minutes spare, walk the block once before your start time. The building occupies the whole of it and you can go round on foot in about six minutes. That turns four addresses into one picture, and removes the only real risk in the day.

The tour that ends somewhere else

One departure does not finish where it started. The two-hour private tour begins outside the Café de la Paix and spends an hour and forty minutes inside. It then walks north-east along Boulevard Haussmann and ends on the roof terrace above the Galeries Lafayette, at number 21. If you are meeting somebody afterwards, meet them there rather than back at the Place.

What is inside a five-minute walk

• The Galeries Lafayette dome, a few minutes up Boulevard Haussmann. The stained-glass cupola is free to stand under and the roof terrace above it is free to walk up to.
• The Café de la Paix, on the corner of the Place, which is where two of these departures meet and a reasonable place to wait.
• Place Vendôme, five minutes south down Rue de la Paix.
• The Tuileries and the Louvre, fifteen minutes on foot through Place Vendôme, which is a better walk than the métro ride.

The map

Paris Opera House Tours lists them all, and visitor information has the opening hours and the admission prices.