Things to do in Montmartre

Montmartre is a hill in Paris, not a separate town: no special transport is needed to reach it from the centre, it sits on the Right Bank like the rest of the city's paris-city districts. The draw is the hilltop around the Sacré-Cœur basilica and the nearby place du Tertre, with its portrait painters and the Moulin Rouge cabaret below on boulevard de Clichy.

The steps up to the basilica get genuinely crowded, especially on weekend afternoons, and that crowd is a known pickpocket spot, alongside metro line 1 and the RER B. A well-known scam here is the friendship bracelet, tied onto your wrist before a price is demanded: decline and keep walking, no need for alarm.

Best visited April to June or September to October, when the steep streets are less packed and temperatures sit in the mild teens to low twenties Celsius rather than summer's heat.