People and places

People and places

Paris is the capital and the most populous city of France . Paris was founded in the 3rd century BC by a Celtic people called the Parisii , who gave the city its name. By the 12th century, Paris was the largest city in the western world, a prosperous trading centre, and the home of the University of Paris , one of the oldest universities in history . By the 17th century it was one of Europe's major centres of finance, commerce, fashion, science, and the arts, and it retains that position still today.

Paris is the capital and the most populous city of France .

Among Paris' important museums and cultural institutions are the most visited art museum in the world, the Louvre , as well as the Musée d'Orsay , noted for its collection of French Impressionist art, and the Musée National d'Art Moderne in the Pompidou Centre, the largest collection of modern and contemporary art in Europe.

The Central area of Paris along the Seine River is classified as a UNESCO Heritage Site , and includes many notable monuments, including Notre Dame Cathedral, the Sainte-Chapelle the Sainte-Chapelle .

In 2015 Paris received 22.2 million visitors, making it one of the world's top tourist destinations and is also known for its fashion, particularly the twice-yearly Paris Fashion Week , and for its haute cuisine , and three-star restaurants.

Tourism

Grand Paris (the City plus three surrounding departments) received 22.2 million visitors in 2015 measured by hotel stays, a decrease of 1.1 percent from 2014, due to two series of deadly terrorist attacks. The largest numbers of foreign tourists in 2015, measured by airport arrivals, came from the United States (1.8 million, down by 3.6 percent from 2014); the UK (1.08 million), Germany (725,000; ) Italy (622,000), and Spain (609,000). In 2015, measured by the MasterCard Global Cities Destination Index, Paris was the third busiest airline destination in the world, with 16.06 million visitors, behind London (18.8 million) and Bangkok (18.24 million). According to the Paris Convention and Visitors Bureau, 393,008 workers in Grand Paris, or 12.4 percent of the total workforce, are engaged in tourism-related sectors;

hotels, catering, transport and leisure. 

As the cathedral of the Archdiocese of Paris, Notre-Dame contains the cathedra of the Archbishop of Paris, currently CardinalAndré Vingt-Trois.The cathedral treasury contains a reliquary which houses some of Catholicism's most important relics, including the purported Crown of Thorns, a fragment of the True Cross, and one of the Holy Nails.

Sacré-Cœur is a double monument, political and cultural, both a national penance for the defeat of France in the 1871 Franco-Prussian War and the socialist Paris Commune of 1871 crowning its most rebellious neighborhood, and an embodiment of conservative moral order, publicly dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus , which was an increasingly popular vision of a loving and sympathetic Christ.

Eiffel Tower

The tower is 324 metres tall, about the same height as an 81-storey building, and the tallest structure in Paris .More than 250 million people have visited the tower since it was completed in 1889. In 2015, there were 6.91 million visitors.[The tower is the most-visited paid monument in the world. An average of 25,000 people ascend the tower every day which can result in long queues.Tickets can be purchased online to avoid the long queues.

There were 74.7 million visitors to the city's museums and monuments in 2015, a drop of 7.2 percent from 2014 due to highly publicised terrorist attacks. The city's top tourist attraction was the Notre Dame Cathedral, which welcomed 13.6 million visitors in 2015. The Louvre museum had 8.4 million visitors in 2015, making it the most visited museum in the world.

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