Insider Tips for What to Do and See in Montmartre, Paris

We love Montmartre and love sharing our insider tips about how to best spend your time in this bohemian neighborhood steeped in history of art and literature.

Now part of the capital, the days of the cheap rents and cheaper haunts and hangouts that made Montmartre a favorite of those with only change in their pockets, are a thing of the past. The bargain basement prices are now gone with the windmills that once dotted the landscape. And landscape it was, countryside, high up in the hills overlooking the capital, with both vineyards and farms and fresh air, with the matching cost of living, away from the bustle of the chic and the moneyed in Paris proper.

A 1913 guide to the area, when it was still in its latter heyday, advises you to leave urban prudery in Paris, as Montmartre is indifferent to public opinion. While we wouldn’t advise any naked escapades, still the neighborhood retains its bohemian je ne sais quoi. Check out our guide to find what to see in Montmartre, Paris today!

UNMISSABLE MONTMARTRE

Clos Montmartre vineyard 14, rue des Saules, Paris 18th

This special wine is grown on a north facing slope, far from being the easiest terrain to produce grapes! It's a charming little vineyard, filled not only with vines but also fruit trees, vegetables, soft fruits and flowers. It's closed to the public, but you can get good views of it from the street or from the gardens of the nearby Musee Montmartre which overlooks it. It was always an alternative to the grand names, and for a few sous artists and models could party with their crowd. Nowadays it's made in the local town hall, only 1750 bottles are produced each year and all proceeds goes to local Montmartre charities. If you can get your hands on a bottle it's a wonderful souvenir, and you can toast to the poets and artists of old Montmartre.

If you'd like to read more about this and other vineyards in Paris, check out our blog post!

The grape harvest festival comes once a year for five short days in October. Along with the montmartrois grape, there’ll also be an abundance of street performance and delicious food stalls.

That said, where to begin?

Morning

• First, the day must begin by getting there. We recommend arriving via the Abbesses station, one of the few remaining Hector Guimard Art Nouveau originals. Once at ground level (we recommend taking the elevator!) you’ll be greeted by one of only three remaining glass canopies in the Paris Métro system. Recently renovated, it's a beauty not to be missed.

• Once out this opens onto a sweet, little shady square.  It seems the right place for a romantic declaration, and just so, right behind the metro, in square Jehan Rictus, a whole wall’s worth of “I love yous” awaits in 311 dialects and languages, some as lost to time as the famed windmills. Amélie Poulain would approve.

• This dose of lovey-dovey done, now it’s time to think of breakfast. You might want to enjoy a café au lait to warm and wake you in this comparatively peaceful spot in one of the nearby cafés,  preparing for the crowds that inevitably will come.

• From the Rue des Abbesses, you can stroll along the rue Lepic, where at the numbers 77 and 83 you can still spy the last standing wooden mills that, up here on the heights, harnessed the wind into the power to grind grain into bread and grapes into the cheap wine quaffed by those living on little. These two wooden mills in fact made up the open-air dance café  Moulin de la Galette, as painted by Renoir (if you want to learn more about it, and many other artists who made Montmartre their home, we'd love you to join us on our tour of the Musee d'Orsay!

• If you’re early enough to the Place du Tertre, you can watch today’s artists set up their easels and palettes for the caricatures, portrait sketches, and views of this charming square. Heck if you’re looking for one of the more unique Montmartre things to do, have your own portrait done, for these are actually serious artists, some having waited a decade for a spot here. They are trying, as ever, to make rent if not a little more, by catering to an idea of another time. But ask them about their other work. They’ll likely be proud to tell you and you could potentially buy a masterpiece in the making while supporting a struggling genius.

Elevenses

• By 11:00 am, Le Consulat, 18 rue Norvins, should just be opening, a café where names out of an art history textbook were real live customers: Monet and Sisley, Van Gogh and Toulouse- Lautrec and even Picasso.

• After fortifying yourself, you can approach the impressive late 19^th century Basilica of Sacré Coeur built from a vow made in 1872, hardly a year after the Paris Commune’s failed uprising. Its self washing white stone was to symbolize absolution for “sins” of France starting with the 1789 Revolution, but with not so subtle reference to this more recent insurrection. You can marvel at the mosaics and the heights of its dome, in fact you can even visit the dome for a small fee. And afterward, look through the telescopes on the plaza for an unforgettable view on the capital below and to the Place Louise Michel, known blasphemously as the Red Virgin. One of the most notorious of the Montmartre rebels, while dressed as a man, she cried for justice for the working poor while battling from the barricades.

• Just next door to the basilica is one of the city’s oldest churches. Saint-Pierre de Montmartre, at 2 rue Mont-Cenis, was here when the Sainte-Chapelle wasn’t even a twinkle in the King’s eye. Right beside it is Calvary Cemetery, also the oldest in Paris, open but once a year on the Feast of All Saints, November 1.

• You’ll want to get a fuller sense of the neighborhood’s history – so make your way to the Museum of Montmartre, 12 rue Cortot, housed in buildings where Renoir himself, and Utrillo after him (some said the former was father to the latter), once lived. This small and charming museum is set in lovely gardens with a small café and is considered one of the most interesting things to do in Montmartre, Paris. You can visit the studio of Suzanne Valadon (artist, muse and mother of Utrillo) and lean over the wall to admire the vineyard below.

The next recommendation on your Montmartre itinerary is to enjoy simply walking around and about the winding cobblestone streets, getting lost as best you can in the lanes around Rue de l’Abreuvoir. This is possibly one of the prettiest streets in Paris, head down to the bust of singer Dalida at the bottom for a fantastic photo op looking up the hill towards the Sacré Coeur. 

• You might walk past the Bateau-Lavoir, the one-time piano factory at 13 rue Ravignan that Poet Max Jacob, called the old Laundry Boat, as its lurching volumes reminded him of laundrywomen working on the Seine. Here Picasso and Braque traded their collages back and forth and invented Cubism along the way.  Rebuilt after the fire hard on the heels of its 1965 restoration, it is now a creation of 1970s style architecture, not at all the grand washing vessel of days gone by. Still though, its place in the annals of art history is monumental!

• Maybe in your wandering you’ll cross paths with Le Passe-Muraille at the place Marcel Aymé. Practice your French and read the wonderful short story of The Man Who Walked Through Walls by Marcel Aymé. Then grab his hand and perhaps you’ll take on some of his superpowers!

Lunch 

• After all that walking, you’re surely ready for lunch. Wend your way back to the corner of the Rue de l’Abreuvoir  and the Rue des Saules  to the Maison Rose, which is perhaps Paris’s cutest restaurant, a favorite of instragrammers everywhere. That reservations open 2 months ahead of the date, should tell you something: book! Over the years the restaurant has served Albert Camus, Pablo Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, Edgar Dégas, Auguste Renoir, Amedeo Modigiani, Edith Piaf and Jacques Brel. One of our favorites is artist Suzanne Valadon, mother to Utrillo (who painted the restaurant) who was also acrobat, model and dancer. Renoir painted her in his triptych Dance at Bougival, and as one of the nudes in Les Baigneuse

Afternoon

• After lunch you might want to stretch your legs. Try the Montmartre Cemetery, 20 avenue Rachel,   where you can pay respects to such luminaries as the Impressionist-Realist Edgar Dégas, the Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau, Francis Picabia the Dadaist (among other things), the mad star of the Ballets Russes, Nijinsky, as well as the cancan artiste and muse of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec La Gouloue (Louise Weber). You’ll find author Emile Zola, and Berlioz. For afficionados of Verdi, you can find the real-life La Traviata, or Camille for the Garbo fans, at the grave of Marie Duplessis, the wildly popular courtesan who ruled Louis-Philippe Paris, lover of Liszt --and many others-- who died of consumption at 23 years old.

• If cemeteries are not your thing, or you prefer to digest sitting down, make your way to Rue Tholozé , number 10, where you’ll find Le Studio 28, the first avant-garde cinema of the city. Opening in 1928, the place was frequented by names like Jean Cocteau, Abel Gance, Luis Buñuel, and Salvador Dalí. This little neighborhood movie house screens big budget blockbusters out of Hollywood, but also remembers its origins with experimental films to this day. It  hard to forget where you come from when two years after its opening right wing mobs descended upon it to prevent the Dalí/Buñuel fil L’Age D’Or from being shown.- accusing it (wrongly) of being a foreign Communist production. In their furor they completely destroyed a Surrealist art exhibit displayed in the cinema’s lobby.

Early evening: apéritif

• The hours of the apéritif has arrived (or indeed, if’s always five o’clock somewhere. Grab a kir at Coeur Sacré, 5 rue Saint-Eleuthère, with their charmer of a terrace overlooking a stunning view of the city! You’ll probably also want some souvenirs – we recommend anything here as the memorabilia is all French made! 

• If you further wish to wet your whistle, here too, we’ve got you covered. Theeeee place to do so, in keeping with the Montmartrois experience would be the Lapin Agile, 22 rue des Saules. First the name, The Agile Rabbit conjures quite an image but originally it was a painter named Gill who did a rabbit image for the sign, the Lapin à Gill or Gill’s Rabbit, but with time and use the title became the one we know today. It’s certainly an improvement over The Assassins, a preceding name of the cabaret. At all events you come here not to dine but to drink. And sing. The fare might include a song from the late middle ages or it might be a hymn of the Revolution or its distant heir, the insurrectional Commune. With habitués that included Modigliani, Picasso, Utrillo, Derain, and Braque, and even Lolo the Donkey (ask for the story), rebellion is the day’s fare. 

By now you’ve seen a good bit of this funky, off-beat neighborhood – you might even have fallen in love with it, and we’d understand. If you decide to stay on, right here in Montmartre itself, check out our recommendation for a very special dinner.

Dinner recommendation

• Le Très Particulier, 23a Avenue Junot, Pavillon D, Perhaps one of the best kept secrets in Montmartre, this tiny hotel (the only one in Paris which is allowed to have less than 6 rooms (they have 5). Even if you can’t stay the night, it still has a gorgeous hidden garden and a delightful bar and restaurant (reservations required for the restaurant). It's the perfect place to end your day.  

and afterwards... 

• If you’re still itching for entertainment, there’s only one thing to do, and that is go to the Moulin Rouge, 82 Boulevard de Clichy. Its famous red windmill, hence the name, is a wink and a nod to the area’s bucolic past,  but as artiste Jane Avril said, it has never ground anything but money. Founded in the heydey of the CanCan dance,  this was a place where the rich could come slumming among artists and associated lowlifes, for the thrill of it. There danced such figures of Montmartrois life as La Goulue (The Glutton) and her partner Valentin de Désossé (Valentine the Deboned), la Môme Fromage (Kid Cheese), and Nini Pattes en l’Air, (Paws-Up Nini). Author and mime Colette once kissed her mistress on its stage. More recently host to names like Ella Fitzgerald and Mikhail Baryshnikov, it remains a de rigueur passage for the full Montmartre experience. 

If you’ve enjoyed your self-guided tour there is so much more to discover with us! We can’t wait to show you more of the real Montmatre, its secrets and stories of yesterday and today, still. Book a Memories France Montmartre tour.

(Note! Montmartre’s key syllable means “mount,”  and that means stairs!! They may indeed make it picturesque, but not very accessible. Some accomodation is possible between the funicular, the Little Train and the Montmartrobus).