Heritage · Landmark
EIFFEL TOWER: History, Attractions & Visitor Guide
EIFFEL TOWER is a historic and cultural icon known for its significance and beauty. Explore its history, key attractions, and visitor information.Written to last — not to trend.
By Confinity Heritage Editorial · 2026-07-20 · 7-minute readQuiet tools, not a toolbar.
The Eiffel Tower (French: la Tour Eiffel) is a wrought-iron lattice tower on the Champ de Mars in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, France. It was built between 1887 and 1889 as the entrance arch and centrepiece of the 1889 Exposition Universelle, the world's fair held to mark the centenary of the French Revolution. Named after the engineer and contractor Gustave Eiffel, whose company designed and built it, the tower rises 330 metres (1,083 feet) and was the tallest man-made structure in the world for 41 years after its completion.
Mocked by many artists and critics while it went up, the tower has since become the defining symbol of Paris and one of the most recognisable structures on earth. It receives close to 7 million visitors a year and is the most-visited monument in the world for which an admission fee is charged. Since 1991 it has stood within the UNESCO World Heritage property "Paris, Banks of the Seine."
The tower began as an idea inside Gustave Eiffel's engineering firm rather than with Eiffel himself. In 1884 two of his senior engineers, Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier, sketched a scheme for a very tall pylon built from four latticed girders that curved together toward a single point. Eiffel was initially unenthusiastic, but he bought the rights to the design and had the architect Stephen Sauvestre reshape it, adding the great masonry-style arches at the base, glazed pavilions on the first level, and other decorative touches that softened the raw engineering into something the public could accept.
When the French government opened a competition in 1886 for a monument to headline the 1889 fair, the brief effectively described Eiffel's project: entrants were asked to "study the possibility of erecting an iron tower on the Champ de Mars with a square base, 125 metres across and 300 metres tall." Of the 107 proposals submitted, Eiffel's won. The state contributed only part of the budget, so Eiffel signed a deal covering most of the cost in exchange for a concession granting him the tower's commercial receipts for 20 years, after which it would pass to the City of Paris.
Excavation started on 26 January 1887, and the assembly of the four pillars followed that summer. The metal was not forged on site. Every one of the 18,038 components was designed and manufactured to the millimetre at Eiffel's factory in Levallois-Perret on the edge of Paris, then carted to the Champ de Mars and bolted into place before rivet teams replaced the temporary bolts with permanent hot rivets. Around 150 to 300 workers laboured on the structure at any one time. The first level was finished on 1 April 1888, the second on 14 August 1888, and the assembly reached the top on 31 March 1889, a total of two years, two months, and five days. Eiffel climbed the 1,665 steps to plant the French tricolour at the summit on that day.
The tower opened to the public on 15 May 1889, and roughly two million people rode or climbed it during the fair. The reception before completion had been far less warm. On 14 February 1887, as the foundations went in, a group of prominent artists and writers published an open letter in the newspaper Le Temps headed "Protest against the Tower of Monsieur Eiffel." They denounced it as a "useless and monstrous" structure and predicted its "hateful shadow" would blot the city for two decades. The signatories included the composer Charles Gounod, the writers Guy de Maupassant and Alexandre Dumas fils, the architect Charles Garnier (who designed the Paris Opéra), and the painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau. Eiffel replied that engineering forms had their own beauty and pointed out that the pyramids of Egypt had also been dismissed in their time.
The tower's most serious brush with destruction came when the concession expired. Eiffel's 20-year agreement was due to end in 1909, at which point the structure could legally have been dismantled and sold for scrap. It survived largely because it had proved useful as a giant antenna. Eiffel had encouraged scientific experiments from the start, and by the early 1900s the French military was using the tower for wireless telegraphy. During the First World War it intercepted enemy radio traffic, helped relay orders during the 1914 Battle of the Marne, and in 1917 picked up transmissions that contributed to the espionage case against Mata Hari. That strategic value, rather than sentiment, is what kept it standing long enough to become beloved.
The tower is a study in doing the most with the least metal. Its frame weighs about 7,300 tonnes of puddle iron, a very pure form of wrought iron, and the full structure with lifts, shops, and antennas comes to roughly 10,100 tonnes. The load is spread so thinly that if the 7,300 tonnes of iron were melted down and poured across the 125-metre square footprint, the resulting sheet would be only about 6.25 centimetres deep. The pressure the tower exerts on the ground beneath each of its four feet is comparable to that of a person sitting on a chair.
The shape was not chosen for looks alone. Eiffel's team worked from the mathematics of wind resistance, tapering the four curved pillars so that the force of the wind is carried down through the ironwork along lines the structure was built to resist. Eiffel wrote that the curves of the four edges were determined by the wind loads they had to withstand. The result is a tower that barely moves. In a strong wind the summit sways no more than about 9 centimetres, and the greater movement actually comes from the sun: as one side heats and expands, the top can lean away from it by as much as 18 centimetres.
The tower stands 330 metres tall today, a figure that has crept upward over the decades as antennas were added; its original architectural height was 300 metres, and a new digital radio antenna installed in 2022 lifted the total to its current 330 metres. That height made it the tallest man-made structure in the world from 1889 until 1930, when the Chrysler Building in New York overtook it. The broadcasting aerials since fitted to the summit mean the Eiffel Tower is once again taller than the Chrysler Building by about 11 metres.
Two details reward a close look. First, the 2.5 million rivets that hold the ironwork together were driven by hand by teams of four, and their placement was worked out in advance so precisely that on-site adjustments were rare. Second, running around the frieze beneath the first balcony are the names of 72 French scientists, engineers, and mathematicians, from Ampère to Lavoisier, whom Eiffel chose to honour. The names were painted over in the early 20th century and restored in 1986 and 1987.
Access on foot is a feat in itself. There are 1,665 steps from the ground to the summit, though the public stairway stops at the second floor. Visitors who choose to climb rather than ride the lifts take 327 steps to the first floor and a further 347 to the second, 674 in all, before an elevator carries them the rest of the way up. The staircase above the second floor is reserved for technicians and maintenance crews.
Within a generation the tower turned from a scandal into a shorthand for France itself. Painters were among the first to change their minds: Georges Seurat, Henri Rousseau, and above all Robert Delaunay, who made the tower the subject of a long series of canvases in the 1910s, treated it as a modern icon rather than an eyesore. Writers, film-makers, and photographers followed, and the silhouette of the four splayed legs and tapering point became instantly legible anywhere in the world.
The tower has also drawn people intent on using it for spectacle. In 1912 the Austrian tailor Franz Reichelt died leaping from the first level while testing a wearable parachute of his own design, a failure recorded on film. On a lighter note, in 1925 the con man Victor Lustig famously "sold" the tower for scrap to a Parisian dealer, twice. Aviators have flown beneath its arches, tightrope walkers have crossed to it, and its height has made it a fixture of newsreels and, later, of films from Ninotchka to countless establishing shots of Paris.
It carries political weight as well as romantic. When Nazi Germany occupied Paris in 1940, the lift cables were reportedly cut so that Adolf Hitler, who visited the city, would have to climb on foot if he wished to reach the top. At the Liberation in 1944 the tricolour was raised over the tower again. In peacetime it has served as the stage for national celebrations, most visibly the Bastille Day fireworks each 14 July and the light shows that mark the New Year and events such as the 2024 Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games, for which the tower flew the Olympic rings.
The tower's night-time appearance is itself protected. The illuminations first installed in 1985, and the sparkling display of thousands of flashing lights added for the millennium and switched on for a few minutes at the top of each hour after dark, are treated under French law as an artistic work, so commercial photographs of the lit tower at night can require permission from the operating company. The daytime image, being an old structure in the public domain, is free to reproduce.
Keeping an iron tower standing in the open air is a permanent job. The structure is repainted roughly every seven years to seal the iron against rust, a task that uses about 60 tonnes of paint applied largely by hand. The tower has received more than 19 full repaintings since 1889. Over the years it has worn several colours, from a reddish-brown to yellow, and today it is coated in a bespoke shade known as "Eiffel Tower Brown," graded in three subtly different tones from dark at the base to light at the top so that it reads as a single even colour against the Paris sky. Lead-based paint was used until around 2001; a major campaign begun ahead of the 2024 Olympics has focused on stripping the many old layers and removing lead, work made slower and more careful by that legacy.
The tower is owned by the City of Paris and run on its behalf by the Société d'Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel (SETE), which manages ticketing, restaurants, and upkeep. It remains a working broadcast site: television has been transmitted from the summit since the 1930s, and the aerials at the top still carry FM radio and digital terrestrial television across the Paris region. Two restaurants operate inside, the Michelin-starred Le Jules Verne on the second floor and Madame Brasserie on the first, and near the top a small room preserves the private apartment that Eiffel kept for himself, now furnished with wax figures of the engineer receiving the inventor Thomas Edison.
Popularity brings its own strain. With visitor numbers near capacity, the site manages long queues, security fencing added around the base, and the wear of millions of feet. Attendance dipped sharply during the 2020–2021 pandemic and recovered to about 5.9 million in 2022, still below the pre-pandemic norm of close to 7 million. The operator has invested in glass safety barriers, a glass floor on the first level added in a 2014 renovation, and ongoing structural inspection to balance access against conservation.
The Eiffel Tower stands on the Champ de Mars at 5 Avenue Anatole France, 75007 Paris, on the Left Bank of the Seine opposite the Trocadéro. The nearest Métro stations are Bir-Hakeim on line 6 and Trocadéro on line 9, and the RER C line stops at Champ de Mars–Tour Eiffel. It generally opens from 9:30 in the morning until around 11:00 at night, with longer hours in summer; the official website publishes exact times and lets visitors book timed tickets in advance, which is the surest way to avoid the longest queues.
Three levels are open to the public. The first floor, at 57 metres, has the glass floor, exhibition displays, and a view down through the ironwork; the second floor, at 116 metres, offers the widest panorama over the city and the restaurants; and the summit, at 276 metres, is reached only by lift and gives the highest publicly accessible view in Paris. Tickets are priced by how high you go and whether you climb the stairs or take a lift, with the stair ticket to the second floor being the cheapest option and the lift-to-summit ticket the most expensive. Reduced rates apply for children, youths, and visitors with disabilities, and lifts make the first and second floors accessible to wheelchair users.
For the best experience, many visitors aim for early morning or the hour around sunset, when the light is kind and the crowds thinner, and stay to see the tower begin its hourly sparkle after dark. The Champ de Mars lawns and the Trocadéro terrace across the river are the classic spots to photograph the whole structure from a distance, and both are free and open at all hours.
History and construction
Engineering and design
Cultural significance
Preservation and the tower today
Visiting
References and resources
- The Eiffel Tower official website (SETE): tickets, opening hours, and visitor information from the operator.
- Eiffel Tower key figures: official dimensions, weight, and construction statistics.
- Eiffel Tower history: the operator's account of the competition, construction, and early years.
- Wikipedia: Eiffel Tower: comprehensive, heavily sourced overview of the tower's history and engineering.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica: Eiffel Tower: concise scholarly summary.
- UNESCO: Paris, Banks of the Seine: the World Heritage listing that includes the tower.
- How many steps does the Eiffel Tower have?: breakdown of the 1,665 steps and public access.
- "Protest against the Tower of Monsieur Eiffel" (1887): the artists' open letter and its signatories.