Emily In France Exclusive 🇫🇷 5 Off-the-Beaten Track Alternatives to Popular Parisian Adventures

Same great views without all the queues

Paris gets about 50 million tourists each year – but some parts of the city are more crowded than others, and of course that makes sense. Most visitors to Paris have a hit list of places they want to see, and since most hit lists look pretty similar, certain spots (the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, Bouillon Pigalle) are nearly impossible to get into – and swarmed once you finally do – while other, equally wonderful places remain relatively empty.

Friends, let me help you find the latter.

Make no mistake: This list is not at all intending to portray tourist attractions as unworthwhile. Many of the places I’m offering alternatives to here, like the picturesque neighborhood of Montmartre or the gorgeous Musée d’Orsay, are some of my personal favorites. If you do want to visit them and avoid the crowds, try to go on weekdays and to travel in the low season. But if you're in Paris on a Saturday in July and you don't want to have your face forced into the armpit of a stranger, here are some lovely alternatives a bit off the tourist track.

If you love Impressionist art, skip the Musée d’Orsay…

…and head west, to the Marmottan.

While the Louvre is undoubtedly Paris’ most-visited museum, I’d wager the Orsay is a top contender for second place. Located just across the river from the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay is housed in a gorgeous former train station built for the World’s Fair of 1900 and is home to some of the best-known Impressionist works of art, including Claude Monet’s Rue Montorgueil, Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Girls at the Piano, Edgar Degas' The Ballet Rehearsal Onstage, and Berthe Morisot’s The Cradle, not to mention later works like Vincent Van Gogh’s The Church at Auvers or earlier works like Gustave Courbet's Origin of the World.

It’s one of my favorite museums in Paris… and it’s always rammed.

Not so for the Marmottan, a relatively small museum on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne located in a former hunting lodge (read: fancy private mansion) owned by the Duke de Valmy. Thanks to a donation by Michel Monet, Claude's second son, the museum boasts over 300 Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, including Impression, Sunrise, the Monet work that inspired the art movement’s name. A beautiful garden just outside the museum is a lovely place for a post-visit picnic.

If you love jaw-dropping views, skip the Eiffel Tower…