Paris in the Rain:
The Best Things to Do
When the Weather Turns

Every year, I watch visitors look at the rain and feel as though Paris has let them down. I understand the feeling — you have planned this trip, you have imagined the photographs, and now the sky is grey and the pavements are wet. I would like to offer a different perspective: Paris in the rain is not a lesser version of Paris. It is a parallel version — quieter, warmer, with shorter queues at the museums, empty cafés in the morning, cobblestones that reflect the lights of the shops in a way that dry stone simply cannot.

Embrace the Covered Passages

I have written an entire guide to the covered passages of Paris (elsewhere on this blog), but they deserve special mention in a rainy-day context — because this is precisely what they were built for. On a rainy day, the passages acquire a quality that they don't quite have in fine weather. The sound of rain on the glass ceiling creates a particular atmosphere. The warm light from the shopfronts becomes more vivid against the grey sky beyond.

Start at the Galerie Vivienne. Connect to the Galerie Colbert. Walk to the Boulevard Montmartre and cross into the Passage Jouffroy. Continue through to the Passage Verdeau. That is approximately two hours of covered walking through four extraordinary 19th-century spaces, with no umbrella required.

Museums Without the Queues

Counterintuitively, a rainy day is not the worst time to visit Paris's major museums — it is often a better time than a sunny one. On fine days in high season, the queues for the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay and the Centre Pompidou are long. On rainy days, visitor numbers drop noticeably.

The Musée d'Orsay — the finest single-room museum in the world, in my opinion — is genuinely enhanced by grey light. The cloud cover outside the glass roof creates an even, diffuse light inside that is remarkably good for looking at paintings.

The Musée Rodin, in the 7th arrondissement, houses Rodin's plaster studies, his personal collection of Monet and Van Gogh, and the intimately scaled bronze works that don't appear in the outdoor sculpture gardens — extraordinary and often nearly empty on a rainy day.

The Musée Carnavalet (free entry, Le Marais) can occupy three to four hours without effort — the complete history of Paris, in two connected mansions, in any weather.

Cafés as Destinations

Parisians do not apologise for spending two hours in a café. The café is, for Parisians, a legitimate use of time — not a place you stop briefly between activities, but a destination in itself. A rainy day in Paris is the optimal occasion to adopt this attitude. Choose a café with good coffee, find a table with a view of the wet street, and stay.

Some cafés worth choosing deliberately: the Café Procope on the rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie (the oldest café in Paris, opened in 1686, frequented by Voltaire, Rousseau, Napoleon and Victor Hugo, still operating and very good); and, for a less famous but often better experience, any of the smaller neighbourhood cafés in Le Marais, Belleville or Montmartre where the coffee is excellent and the clientele is entirely Parisian.

The Churches: Overlooked and Extraordinary

Paris has over one hundred churches open to the public, most of them free and almost all of them overlooked by visitors focused on Notre-Dame and the Sacré-Cœur. On a rainy day, these vast, heated, silent interiors become exceptional.

Saint-Sulpice, in the 6th arrondissement, contains a gnomon — a scientific instrument embedded in the floor — and a set of Delacroix murals in the first chapel on the right that are among the finest things the painter produced. Sainte-Chapelle, on the Île de la Cité (ticket required), is one of the most extraordinary Gothic interiors in existence: a room whose walls have been almost entirely replaced by stained-glass windows. On a grey day, the windows glow with a particular vividness.

The Private Car as Rainy-Day Option

On a rainy day in Paris, a private car covers the distances between the covered passages, the museum, the café and the church without any exposure to the weather whatsoever. Several clients have told me that their favourite day of a Paris trip was a rainy one they had initially dreaded — spent moving between interiors in the car, with time to absorb each place without rushing to the next one before the weather changed.