Paris

Forget the version you have already seen on a postcard. The real Paris in summer is a city that half-empties: by August the shopkeepers, bakers and bistro owners tape "fermeture annuelle" to their windows and decamp to the south. The tourists pour in to fill the gap, and what is left is stranger and better than the cliché. Long evenings on the canal. A near-deserted residential quarter at noon. Notre-Dame, reopened, free, and lit again after the fire. And, since the river was cleaned up for the 2024 Olympics, the genuinely odd sight of Parisians swimming in the Seine.

When to go

May and September are the months to aim for: roughly 20°C, the light long and forgiving, the Parisians back and the city working as a city again. August is the gamble. Average highs sit around 25°C, but heatwaves now push past 36°C in a city with very little air conditioning, and a canicule in a top-floor apartment is a real consideration. The trade-off is that August is when the city does its summer in public, on the riverbanks. For the one big set-piece, come for Bastille Day on 14 July: a parade down the Champs-Élysées, a concert on the Champ de Mars, and fireworks off the Eiffel Tower.

What it's actually like

Paris runs on two registers and the summer exposes both. There is the monumental city, the one that photographs itself, busy from nine in the morning until the queues thin after dark. Then there is the residential city behind it, quiet enough in August that you can hear your own footsteps on a street in the 11th at lunchtime. The food is where the place still argues for itself: a proper jambon-beurre from a neighbourhood boulangerie, a steak frites that arrives without ceremony, an hour over a single coffee that nobody will hurry you through. The catch is that some of the best small kitchens are precisely the ones shut for the holidays. The residential calm and the closed shutters come together.

The neighbourhood you want

Base yourself in the 11th, around Bastille and Oberkampf. It holds the city's highest concentration of genuinely good non-tourist restaurants: Septime, Clamato, Le Servan and Double Dragon sit within a few streets of Rue de Charonne. It is a short walk from both the Marais and Canal Saint-Martin, and mid-range hotels run roughly €90 to €200 a night, 20 to 30 per cent under equivalent Marais rooms. The 10th, along Canal Saint-Martin, is the alternative if you want the waterside evenings and don't mind being slightly further out. Skip basing yourself immediately around the big monuments; you will pay more to sleep inside the crowd.

Don't miss

Swimming in the Seine. For summer 2026 three free, lifeguarded bathing sites open along the river: Bercy in the 12th facing the Mitterrand library, Grenelle in the 15th with the Eiffel Tower in view, and a new spot by the Pont Louis-Philippe replacing the old Bras Marie basin. Changing rooms, showers and no entry fee. A single Métro ride to reach them costs €2.55 on a Navigo Easy card (€2 for the card itself). It is the one thing here that did not exist a few years ago, and the one most worth rearranging a day around. For the simplest pleasure in the city, a €1.60 baguette from Boulangerie Utopie at 20 rue Jean-Pierre-Timbaud: Xavier Netry's loaf won the 2024 Grand Prix de la Baguette, and it is best eaten walking, before lunch, while the crust is still loud.