Seine River Night Cruise from the Eiffel Tower with Audio Guide Paris

Port de la Bourdonnais and the Eiffel Tower pier

The cruise starts and ends at Port de la Bourdonnais, pier 3, the quay directly below the Eiffel Tower on the Left Bank, so the first thing you see from the deck is the tower itself rising 330 metres over the river. Built for the 1889 World's Fair and lit in gold every evening from dusk, it sparkles for five minutes on the hour until late, and a boat leaving just before the hour catches the show from the water. The pier is reached by the steps down from the riverside quay, a short walk from the Bir-Hakeim metro (line 6) and the Champ de Mars–Tour Eiffel RER C station.

How to get to the Seine cruise from the Eiffel Tower: come down to the river on the tower side, not the Trocadéro side, and look for pier number 3. The departure schedule is printed on your electronic ticket; arrive early for the sailing you want, because queues are longer in high season and at sunset.

The Left Bank: Les Invalides, the National Assembly and the Musée d'Orsay

Heading east, the boat passes the Pont de l'Alma and the Pont Alexandre III, the most ornate bridge in Paris, with its gilded statues and lamps built for the 1900 World's Fair. On the Left Bank the gilded dome of Les Invalides, the military hospital founded in 1670 and now the resting place of the emperor who ruled France in the early nineteenth century, glows above the trees, followed by the columned facade of the National Assembly, the lower house of the French parliament, facing the Place de la Concorde across the water.

Next comes the Musée d'Orsay, the former railway station of 1900 turned museum of Impressionist art, whose two giant clock faces are lit at night and read clearly from the river. The audio guide explains each building as it appears, so you can look rather than read. Across the river the Tuileries Garden and the long wing of the Louvre begin, and the boat continues towards the Pont des Arts and the domed Institut de France.

Île de la Cité: Notre-Dame and the Conciergerie

The heart of the Seine cruise at night is the turn around the Île de la Cité, the island where Paris was born more than two thousand years ago. The boat passes the Pont Neuf, the oldest surviving bridge in the city, completed in 1607, and sails along the Conciergerie, the medieval royal palace with its round towers that became the prison of the Revolution. Then the two towers and the flying buttresses of Notre-Dame Cathedral appear, floodlit against the sky, the Gothic masterpiece begun in 1163 and reopened in December 2024 after the restoration that followed the fire of 2019.

The boat rounds the tip of the island by the Île Saint-Louis, the quiet seventeenth-century island of mansions and plane trees, which is where most one-hour Seine cruises turn back towards the Eiffel Tower. This stretch is the best for photographs: keep your camera ready on the upper deck as the cathedral passes on the right going out and on the left coming back.

The Right Bank: the Louvre, Place de la Concorde and the Grand Palais

On the return the boat follows the Right Bank along the Louvre, the former royal palace that became the largest museum in the world, whose river facade stretches for nearly half a kilometre; at night its stone is lit warm gold and the glass pyramid glows behind the arches of the Cour Carrée. Past the Tuileries comes the Place de la Concorde, marked from the water by the Luxor obelisk, a granite monument more than three thousand years old that has stood on the square since 1836.

The glass roof of the Grand Palais, the exhibition hall of 1900 restored for the 2024 Olympic Games, rises next, then the Pont Alexandre III again from the other direction. The audio guide fills this part of the route with the history of the bridges you pass under: there are 37 crossings over the Seine inside Paris, and the cruise passes under more than a dozen of them, each with its own lamps and carvings.

Palais de Chaillot and the illuminated Eiffel Tower

The final stretch of the Paris night cruise is the one people remember: the Eiffel Tower growing larger ahead, the curved wings of the Palais de Chaillot on the Trocadéro hill on the right bank, and the fountains of the Trocadéro gardens in between. The boat continues a little beyond the tower before turning back to the pier, giving the full view of the tower reflected in the water from both sides. If your sailing ends close to the hour, you will be on the river for the sparkle, which lasts five minutes.

After you disembark, the Champ de Mars lawn behind the tower and the Trocadéro terrace across the Pont d'Iéna are the two classic spots to continue the evening with the tower in front of you. The best time to take a Seine cruise at night is from about half an hour after sunset, which means around 18:00 in winter and after 22:00 in June; check the sunset time for your date when you pick a departure.