Montmartre & Sacre-Coeur 2-Hour Walking Tour with Local Guide Paris

Place Blanche and the Moulin Rouge

The walk begins at Place Blanche, where the Boulevard de Clichy meets the foot of the hill, under the red sails of the Moulin Rouge, the cabaret that opened in 1889, the same year as the Eiffel Tower, and gave the world the can-can. The windmill on its roof is a decoration, not a mill, but it recalls the real windmills that once ground flour and gypsum on the hill above; the gypsum quarries of Montmartre gave the city its building plaster, which is where the expression plaster of Paris comes from. The guide uses the square to explain the geography of the hill: the raucous boulevards of Pigalle below and the quiet village lanes above.

How to get to the Montmartre walking tour: metro line 2 to Blanche; the guide waits with a red umbrella outside the coffee shop opposite the Moulin Rouge. The tour visits the cabaret from the outside only, and the stop lasts about fifteen minutes.

Rue Lepic: the café and the painter's house

Rue Lepic climbs from Place Blanche in a long curve that was laid out so that carts could reach the quarries at the top. Its lower end is a market street of bakeries, cheese shops and greengrocers, and on the corner stands the Café des Deux Moulins, a classic neighbourhood café with its zinc counter and mosaic floor that has become a stop on every Montmartre guided tour. A little higher, at number 54, a plaque marks the apartment where a Dutch painter lived with his art-dealer brother from 1886 to 1888, the two years in which his dark northern palette turned to the bright colours he is known for; he painted the windmills and the view from this window.

The guide pauses at both for about ten minutes each. Rue Lepic is also where the climb becomes real, so comfortable shoes matter from here on, and the street gives the first views back over the rooftops of the ninth arrondissement.

The Bateau-Lavoir and the Moulin de la Galette

On the small, leafy Place Émile Goudeau stands the Bateau-Lavoir, a wooden building of cheap studios named after the laundry boats of the Seine because it creaked in the wind. Between 1904 and 1914 it housed a group of poor painters and poets from Spain, Italy and France whose experiments here produced Cubism; the great painting that launched the movement was made in one of these rooms in 1907. The original building burned in 1970 and was rebuilt in 1978; studios are still rented to artists, and a window display tells the story.

A few streets on, at the top of Rue Lepic, the Moulin de la Galette is one of the last two surviving windmills of Montmartre, built in the seventeenth century and turned in the nineteenth into an open-air dance hall where the people of the hill danced on Sunday afternoons under the trees, a scene fixed in one of the most famous Impressionist paintings. Each stop lasts about ten minutes on this Montmartre artists tour.

Au Lapin Agile and Rue de l'Abreuvoir

Rue des Saules drops down the north side of the hill to Au Lapin Agile, a tiny pink cottage with green shutters, ivy on its walls and a painted sign of a rabbit jumping out of a saucepan, which gave the cabaret its name. From 1860 it was the meeting place of the hill's painters and poets, who paid their bills in pictures, and it still hosts evenings of French song and poetry in a room that has hardly changed. The guide stops here for about fifteen minutes to tell the stories of its regulars and of the hoax painting made by a donkey's tail that fooled the Paris art world in 1910.

Rue de l'Abreuvoir, named after the watering trough where animals drank on their way to the quarries, is one of the prettiest streets in Paris, curving between gardens and ivy-covered houses to the pink Maison Rose on the corner, a former café painted by the artists who lived around it and photographed by every visitor since.

The Clos Montmartre vineyard

Across from Au Lapin Agile, a small fenced slope of vines runs down the hill: the Clos Montmartre, planted in 1933 on waste ground to stop a developer building on it, and the last working vineyard inside the city of Paris. Vines covered the hill in the Middle Ages, when the abbey that stood on the summit owned the land, and the modern plot of about 1,500 vines is tended by the city as a living reminder. Its harvest in October is the excuse for the hill's biggest street festival, with parades, music and stalls through the lanes.

The guide explains the history of farming on the hill, the abbey and the windmills, and the gardens behind the fence, which are opened to the public only a few days a year. From here the Rue Saint-Vincent and the steps of Rue du Mont-Cenis lead up to the summit; this is the steepest part of the Montmartre tour and takes about ten minutes.

Sacré-Cœur and the panorama over Paris

The walk ends on the summit of the hill, 130 metres above the Seine, in front of the Sacré-Cœur Basilica. Built between 1875 and 1914 as a national vow after the defeat of 1870 and the Paris Commune, and consecrated in 1919, it is made of a travertine stone that releases a white mineral when it rains, so the domes grow whiter with age. The central dome is 83 metres high, and the bell tower holds a bell of about nineteen tonnes. The basilica is open daily from 6:30 to 22:30 and entry is free; the climb to the dome needs a separate ticket and is not part of this tour.

The terrace in front gives the famous panorama across the whole city, from the towers of La Défense to the Pantheon, and from here the guide leaves you with suggestions for the Place du Tertre with its portrait painters a few steps behind the basilica, the Montmartre museum and the funicular down to Anvers metro.