Castles · Tour

Sainte-Chapelle, Conciergerie and the Working Courts of the Palais de Justice

Three buildings on the Île de la Cité, taken as one private tour, because they were one complex before they were three monuments. The Conciergerie is where it starts. The court of the French Revolution sat here, and the cells and the tombs of its heroes and its criminals are still in the building. The guide takes the group inside. Next door is the Palais de Justice, the judicial centre of Paris and a courthouse that has never stopped working. That is the part almost no walking tour includes, and it changes how the other two read: the Revolution did not happen in a museum, it happened in the offices next to this one. Sainte-Chapelle finishes it. Gothic architecture at its limit, with the medieval stained glass that people travel to Paris for. The colour is the thing everyone remembers, and it depends on the hour, so the light in the upper chapel is never the same twice. The group forms outside the Cité metro station, which puts all three within a few minutes' walk.