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Montmartre Paris Tours › Montmartre Paris Street by Street: The 12 Places Worth Your TimeUpdated 2026-09-08
What to see

Montmartre Paris Street by Street: The 12 Places Worth Your Time

Hours, prices and access verified by the Montmartre Paris Tours team — last checked 2026-09-08

A cobbled Montmartre lane lined with potted bay trees

The short answer

Walk it bottom to top: the Moulin Rouge, the cemetery, rue Lepic, the Bateau-Lavoir, Le Mur des Je t’aime, the basilica, Place du Tertre, La Maison Rose and the vineyard. Two hours in that order, four if you add the cemetery and the dome.

Why order matters more than a list

Montmartre is a dome of ground about a kilometre across with no signposted route through it, and the difference between a good morning and a tiring one is the sequence. Walk it bottom to top and you climb once. Walk it in the order the guidebooks list the sights and you climb four times. The twelve below run in the order the hill puts them, from the boulevard at the foot to the vineyard on the north slope.

The twelve, in walking order

#Place Time to allowFree?
1Moulin Rouge10 minutesOutside, yes
2Montmartre Cemetery1 hourYes
3Café des Deux Moulins10 minutesYes
454 rue Lepic — Van Gogh’s house5 minutes Outside, yes
5Moulin de la Galette10 minutesOutside, yes
6Le Bateau-Lavoir5 minutesOutside, yes
7Le Mur des Je t’aime10 minutesYes
8Sacré-Cœur30–45 minutesYes
9The dome45 minutes€8
10Place du Tertre20 minutesYes
11La Maison Rose5 minutesOutside, yes
12Clos Montmartre and Au Lapin Agile15 minutesYes

1. Moulin Rouge, 82 boulevard de Clichy

Opened in 1889, still running its revue, and the easiest landmark in the quarter to find — which is why eight of the guided walks here meet within sight of it. From the pavement it takes ten minutes and a photograph.

2. Montmartre Cemetery, 20 avenue Rachel

More than 20,000 graves in a sunken quarry under an iron road bridge, with Degas, Nijinsky, Truffaut and Dalida among them. Free, and almost empty at nine in the morning. It opens at 8am on weekdays and closes at 6pm from mid-March to early November, half an hour earlier in winter, with nobody admitted in the last quarter of an hour.

3. Café des Deux Moulins, 15 rue Lepic

The café from Amélie, and a working café rather than a shrine. Worth a coffee if you want one, worth ten seconds if you do not.

4. 54 rue Lepic

Van Gogh lived here with his brother Theo for two years and his palette changed completely in that time. There is a plaque and a doorway; the paintings are in the Musée d’Orsay, on the other side of the river.

5. Moulin de la Galette

One of the two windmills left on a hill that once had thirty. It ground flour, then pressed grapes, then became a dance garden, and Renoir painted it. Private, and visible from the street.

6. Le Bateau-Lavoir, Place Émile-Goudeau

The most consequential address on the hill: Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in these studios, with Modigliani and Juan Gris working in the same building. The original burned down in 1970, so what you see is a reconstruction and a plaque.

7. Le Mur des Je t’aime, Square Jehan Rictus

Forty square metres of enamelled lava — 612 tiles, each 21 by 29.7 centimetres — carrying “I love you” in the languages Frédéric Baron collected by knocking on embassy doors. Claire Kito did the calligraphy. It is free, it is open, and it takes ten minutes.

8. Sacré-Cœur

Free to enter, every day from 6.30am to 10.30pm. The apse mosaic of Christ in Majesty covers 480 square metres and was inaugurated in 1923; continuous prayer has been kept here without a break since 1 August 1885. Give it half an hour.

9. The dome

€8, 280 steps, no lift, and the only paid climb on the hill. Open from 10.30am with last admission at 8.15pm, closed briefly at midday, and shut altogether in bad weather.

10. Place du Tertre

The painters’ square. Before 10am it belongs to the artists setting up; by noon in July it is shoulder to shoulder. Twenty minutes is plenty unless you are sitting down.

11. La Maison Rose, rue de l’Abreuvoir

The pink house with green shutters that Utrillo painted and everybody photographs. It is a restaurant, and the corner is the point.

12. Clos Montmartre and Au Lapin Agile, rue des Saules

2,000 vines behind railings, first harvested in 1934 and still worked, opposite the oldest cabaret on the hill. The City of Paris opens the vineyard on guided visits only; from the street it is free.

🍷 Did you know? The Clos Montmartre yields up to 1,300 kilos of grapes in a good year. The wine is pressed and bottled at the town hall of the 18th arrondissement, and the money goes to social work in the district.

Three of these are worth reading about first

The Sacré-Cœur took more than forty years to build and its story is the story of the hill. Le Bateau-Lavoir looks like a doorway and is where Cubism started. And the Moulin de la Galette is one of two survivors from a hill that once had thirty windmills on it. Knowing that before you stand there changes all three.

The three that reward going inside

Nine of the twelve above are things you look at from the street. Three are not, and they are the ones worth planning around.

The basilica is free and takes half an hour, and the mosaic above the apse is 480 square metres of it, so give yourself long enough to sit down and look up. The dome is €8 and 280 steps, and it is the only paid climb on the hill. Montmartre Cemetery is an hour on its own, free, and almost nobody who does the rest of this list bothers with it — which is exactly why it is pleasant.

What is not on this list, and why

Two famous names are missing on purpose. Le Consulat and the other painted-frontage restaurants around Place du Tertre photograph beautifully and are worth walking past, but they are a corner rather than a stop. And the Musée de Montmartre at 12 rue Cortot is genuinely good — Renoir, Valadon and Utrillo all worked in the building, and the gardens are laid out after his paintings — but at €16 and two hours it is a decision rather than a street. Both are on the things-to-do page, which is the list of what to do here rather than what to look at.

What to skip if you only have two hours

Drop the cemetery and the dome. The cemetery is an hour on its own and sits at the bottom of the hill on the wrong side; the dome is 280 steps and a queue. Everything else on the list above fits comfortably into two hours if you walk it in order, which is exactly what the one-day itinerary guide sets out. The landmarks page has each one in more depth, and Montmartre walking tours cover most of them with somebody explaining as you go.

Walk it uphill once, in this order, and Montmartre stops being a maze. The guided walks that follow it are on Montmartre Paris Tours.

Guided walks that take this route