Montmartre: Where to Go
When You've Seen
the Sacré-Cœur

Montmartre is the most visited hill in Paris and, by some measures, one of the most visited sites in all of France. Approximately ten million people climb those steps each year to stand in front of the Sacré-Cœur, take a photograph, and then — almost universally — walk to the Place du Tertre to watch a painter reproduce their likeness for sixty euros. If you stop there, you have seen approximately fifteen percent of what Montmartre actually is.

The Village Within the City

Montmartre was an independent village until 1860, when Haussmann's annexation absorbed it into Paris. That village identity never entirely disappeared. Walking through the streets north and west of the Sacré-Cœur — the rue Lepic, the rue des Abbesses, the maze of alleys between the rue Caulaincourt and the rue du Mont-Cenis — you feel the urban texture shift. The streets narrow. The buildings shrink to three or four storeys. Cats sit in windows. Someone is hanging laundry.

This is the Montmartre that Renoir painted, that Picasso worked in, that Erik Satie composed in. It is quieter than almost anywhere else in central Paris, and it is a ten-minute walk from one of the most crowded tourist sites in Europe.

The Vineyard: A Working Reminder of Another Paris

In the 18th arrondissement, on the corner of the rue des Saules and the rue Saint-Vincent, there is a working vineyard in the middle of Paris. The Clos Montmartre has been producing wine since 1934 — a symbolic recovery of the agricultural tradition that made Montmartre famous before the city swallowed it.

The harvest festival in October (La Fête des Vendanges) is one of the great local celebrations of the Parisian year: free, chaotic, and attended mostly by Parisians who know about it rather than tourists who don't. But the vineyard is visible and photogenic year-round, through the fence on the rue des Saules. The contrast between the vines, the old stone walls and the city stretching below is one of those quintessentially Parisian compositions that refuses to look real.

The Hidden Staircases: Getting Deliberately Lost

Montmartre's topography creates something you find nowhere else in Paris: staircases as streets. Some are official, listed on maps. Most are not. They connect one level of the hill to another through passages that feel entirely private, occasionally overgrown, and almost never marked.

My advice: get lost deliberately. The hill is small enough that you cannot get seriously lost, and the discoveries you make in the alleys are invariably better than anything on the itinerary. The Escaliers de la Butte that connect the rue Chappe to the rue Gabrielle pass through a tunnel of ivy and iron railings that has barely changed since the 19th century.

The Artists' Ateliers: Where the Work Actually Happened

The Bateau-Lavoir, on the Place Émile-Goudeau, is the building where Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907 — arguably the most important single moment in the history of modern art, achieved in a wooden building with no heating and no running water. The building burned down in 1970 and was rebuilt; the exterior is visible from the street.

The Musée de Montmartre, in the Maison du Bel-Air on the rue Cortot, is the most underrated museum in the neighbourhood. It occupies the oldest house in Montmartre — inhabited at various points by Renoir, Suzanne Valadon, her son Maurice Utrillo, and Raoul Dufy. The garden, which overlooks the vineyard, is one of the most beautiful small gardens in Paris. Almost no one sits in it.

Rue Lepic and the Abbesses: The Quiet Side

The rue Lepic is Montmartre's main market street — a long, winding descent from the upper village to the Place des Abbesses, lined with butchers, cheese shops, fishmongers and cafés. Van Gogh lived at number 54 with his brother Theo. The windmills of the Moulin Radet and the Moulin de la Galette — both visible from the street — are the last survivors of what was once a hill covered in thirty mills.

The Place des Abbesses contains one of the two original Art Nouveau Métro entrances designed by Hector Guimard. The Je t'aime wall nearby carries the words "I love you" in 250 languages. Tourists find it easily. What they rarely notice is that there is almost always a local couple standing in front of it, quietly.