Paris, France

Day 1

• Eiffel Tower

  Open every day from 9.30am to 11pm. The price changes a great deal depending on how you go up: €23.50 to the second floor by lift, €36.70 to the summit, but only €14.80 walking up to the second floor and €28 combining stairs and lift for the top. It is 674 steps to the second floor, they are in the open air and there is almost never a queue: you save nine euros and an hour of waiting. Access to the summit can be suspended in high wind or heavy crowds, and the supplement is refunded when it is.

• Notre-Dame de Paris

  Entry is free and no booking is required, but with around forty thousand visitors a day the queue is the norm. The system almost nobody uses: on the official site and app you can book a free time slot, and it opens only a few hours ahead, not days. The towers are separate, €16 with compulsory booking, open 9am-11pm from April to September and until 5.30pm the rest of the year. No third-party platform is authorised to sell entry: the ones that do are selling air.

• Montmartre and Sacré-Cœur

  The basilica is free to enter every day from 6.30am to 10.30pm. Climbing the dome is another matter: 280 steps up a narrow stair, tickets sold only at the desk on site and not online, open 10.30am-9.30pm with last admission at 9pm, and closed in the middle of the day for the attendant's break, the detail that defeats anyone arriving at lunchtime. To skip the hill's staircases there is the RATP funicular: a minute and a half, and it takes an ordinary metro ticket.

Day 2

• Louvre Museum

  From this year the price depends on where you live: €22 for residents of the European Economic Area and €32 for everyone else. It is free under 18 and for EU residents up to 26. Closed on Tuesdays; on Wednesdays and Fridays it stays open until 9pm, which is the slot where the Mona Lisa can be seen without three rows of heads in front of it. Entry is free on the first Friday of the month after 6pm, except in July and August, and on 14 July. A time slot has to be booked even by those entering free.

• Le Marais district

  A district to be walked, with no tickets. The practical fact worth more than any description: this is one of the zones of Paris where shops are allowed to open on Sunday, and they do, while most of the city is shut. Sunday is therefore the day the Marais is liveliest and fullest. Rue des Rosiers is the street of the Jewish quarter, with its bakeries and falafel; on Saturdays many Jewish businesses close for shabbat and reopen on Sunday.

• Croissant and baguette from an artisan boulangerie

  In France 'boulangerie' is a title protected by law: only those who knead and bake on the premises may use it, so the sign is already a guarantee and outlets reselling frozen dough must call themselves something else. The baguette de tradition is made of flour, water, salt and yeast and nothing else, with no additives and no freezing: that is the one to ask for, not the ordinary baguette. Each year the city awards the best one, and the winner supplies the Élysée for a year: winning bakeries put it in the window.

Day 1

• Promenade Plantée (Coulée Verte)✦ hidden gem

  Almost five kilometres of linear park on top of a 19th-century railway viaduct, from the Bastille almost to the Bois de Vincennes, opened in 1993: it is the original that inspired New York's High Line, not the other way round. You walk ten metres above the street among roses, bamboo and lime trees, and it is free. It closes in the evening and keeps seasonal hours, so it is not a night-time shortcut. Under the viaduct arches are the craft workshops of the Viaduc des Arts, on shop hours.

• Covered passages (Galerie Vivienne and around)✦ hidden gem

  In the 19th century there were over a hundred, today about twenty remain: arcades roofed in glass and iron, built to let people shop out of the mud of the streets before pavements existed. The Galerie Vivienne dates from 1823 and keeps its original floor mosaics. They are free and walked through like streets, but they are private: they have gates and close in the evening, generally around 8pm. On Sundays many of the shops inside are shut even when the arcade is open.

• Musée Carnavalet✦ hidden gem

  The permanent collections are free and need no booking: this is the museum of the history of Paris, in two Marais mansions with courtyards, holding the original shop signs of old trades, Proust's bedroom and models of the city before Haussmann. Open Tuesday to Sunday 10am-6pm, closed Mondays. The temporary exhibitions are ticketed and worth booking. It is the right place when it rains and you do not want to queue anywhere.

Day 2

• Canal Saint-Martin✦ hidden gem

  The canal was dug to bring drinking water into Paris and for a kilometre and a half it runs covered, beneath boulevard Richard-Lenoir: the boats that work it pass inside the dark vault lit by the air shafts, and that is the part nobody expects. On the surface are nine locks and the iron footbridges, and every few years the canal is drained for cleaning: then you see the bed, bicycles and all. In the evening people sit on the quayside with a bottle and glasses: that is allowed, glass in parks is not.

• Marché des Enfants Rouges✦ hidden gem

  It is the oldest covered market in Paris, opened in 1615, and takes its name from the orphanage that stood here, whose children wore red. Today half of it is cheese, fruit and flower stalls and half kitchens (Moroccan, Lebanese, Japanese, Italian), with shared tables where you eat elbow to elbow. It is closed on Mondays like almost every Paris market, and at weekday lunchtimes the tables go early: arrive before 12.30 or after 2pm.

Day 1

• Croissant and baguette from an artisan boulangerie

  In France 'boulangerie' is a title protected by law: only those who knead and bake on the premises may use it, so the sign is already a guarantee and outlets reselling frozen dough must call themselves something else. The baguette de tradition is made of flour, water, salt and yeast and nothing else, with no additives and no freezing: that is the one to ask for, not the ordinary baguette. Each year the city awards the best one, and the winner supplies the Élysée for a year: winning bakeries put it in the window.

• Steak-frites and Parisian bistros

  The bistro dish by definition, but the thing to look for is the 'fait maison' logo, the saucepan under a roof: since 2014 French law reserves it for dishes cooked on site from raw ingredients, and places that do not display it are usually reheating. The cooking is ordered in French and the scale does not match ours: bleu is nearly raw, saignant is rare, à point is pink inside, not well done. Asking for 'bien cuit' is legitimate but in a serious brasserie you will get a look.

• Marché des Enfants Rouges✦ hidden gem

  It is the oldest covered market in Paris, opened in 1615, and takes its name from the orphanage that stood here, whose children wore red. Today half of it is cheese, fruit and flower stalls and half kitchens (Moroccan, Lebanese, Japanese, Italian), with shared tables where you eat elbow to elbow. It is closed on Mondays like almost every Paris market, and at weekday lunchtimes the tables go early: arrive before 12.30 or after 2pm.