Description
The Eiffel Tower is the 330-meter iron lattice tower on the Champ de Mars that turned Paris into a skyline anyone can recognize. Built for the 1889 World's Fair, it is the most visited paid monument in the world, with about seven million visitors a year.
You can climb it, by stairs or by lift, to three levels. The first floor, 57 meters up, has a restaurant and a glass floor over the void. The second floor, at 115 meters, is home to Le Jules Verne, a gourmet restaurant with one Michelin star.
The summit, at 276 meters, is the highest observation deck in the European Union, with a champagne bar. Up there is also Gustave Eiffel's apartment, furnished as in his day, where wax figures replay his meeting with Thomas Edison.
Eight lifts do the work, but anyone with strong legs can climb: 300 steps lead to the first floor and another 300 to the second. Flashing bulbs and searchlights light the tower for New Year's Eve and Bastille Day.
The structure is a show of its own. Eiffel's engineers drew 18,038 iron pieces to the millimeter and joined them with 2.5 million rivets, none reshaped on site. It is painted in three shades, lighter toward the top, and repainted every seven years with 60 tons of paint.
Against it, a "Committee of Three Hundred", one member for every meter of its height, signed a protest: a "useless and monstrous" tower, a "gigantic black smokestack" crushing Notre-Dame and the Louvre. Guy de Maupassant, the story goes, later lunched in its restaurant every day. It was the one place in Paris where he couldn't see it.
It was meant to come down in 1909. Radio saved it: in 1914 its transmitter jammed German communications before the Battle of the Marne. Thirty years later Hitler ordered Paris destroyed, the tower included. General von Choltitz did not obey.
It went up in just over two years, and it was the first structure ever to pass 300 meters. It stayed the tallest in the world for 41 years, until New York's Chrysler Building.
Don't miss
• The glass floor of the first level.
• Gustave Eiffel's apartment at the top.
• The 72 names of French scientists engraved on the tower.
• The summit's view over Paris.
Did you know?
• In 1925 the con man Victor Lustig "sold" the tower for scrap metal. Twice.
• On sunny days the top leans away from the sun by up to 18 centimeters, as the iron expands.
• Melted down, its iron would cover its square base just 6 centimeters deep.
You can climb it, by stairs or by lift, to three levels. The first floor, 57 meters up, has a restaurant and a glass floor over the void. The second floor, at 115 meters, is home to Le Jules Verne, a gourmet restaurant with one Michelin star.
The summit, at 276 meters, is the highest observation deck in the European Union, with a champagne bar. Up there is also Gustave Eiffel's apartment, furnished as in his day, where wax figures replay his meeting with Thomas Edison.
Eight lifts do the work, but anyone with strong legs can climb: 300 steps lead to the first floor and another 300 to the second. Flashing bulbs and searchlights light the tower for New Year's Eve and Bastille Day.
The structure is a show of its own. Eiffel's engineers drew 18,038 iron pieces to the millimeter and joined them with 2.5 million rivets, none reshaped on site. It is painted in three shades, lighter toward the top, and repainted every seven years with 60 tons of paint.
Against it, a "Committee of Three Hundred", one member for every meter of its height, signed a protest: a "useless and monstrous" tower, a "gigantic black smokestack" crushing Notre-Dame and the Louvre. Guy de Maupassant, the story goes, later lunched in its restaurant every day. It was the one place in Paris where he couldn't see it.
It was meant to come down in 1909. Radio saved it: in 1914 its transmitter jammed German communications before the Battle of the Marne. Thirty years later Hitler ordered Paris destroyed, the tower included. General von Choltitz did not obey.
It went up in just over two years, and it was the first structure ever to pass 300 meters. It stayed the tallest in the world for 41 years, until New York's Chrysler Building.
Don't miss
• The glass floor of the first level.
• Gustave Eiffel's apartment at the top.
• The 72 names of French scientists engraved on the tower.
• The summit's view over Paris.
Did you know?
• In 1925 the con man Victor Lustig "sold" the tower for scrap metal. Twice.
• On sunny days the top leans away from the sun by up to 18 centimeters, as the iron expands.
• Melted down, its iron would cover its square base just 6 centimeters deep.