Where to stay in Paris

This is the literal centre: the arrondissement numbering starts here and spirals outward, and Notre-Dame, the Musee d'Orsay, the Marais and Saint-Germain are all inside a 25-minute walk. Chatelet-Les Halles sits under the eastern end with metro 1, 4, 7, 11 and 14 and RER A, B and D, which means Charles de Gaulle in about 35 minutes without changing trains. Nowhere else in Paris is this well connected.

The district changes completely across its own length. The western end around place Vendome and the Tuileries is expensive and quiet and closes early. East of the Palais-Royal it turns into Les Halles, a shopping mall with a park on the roof that the city says takes 800,000 visitors a day, and the streets around it are chains, fast food and the least Parisian blocks in the centre.

Fewer than 18,000 people live in the whole arrondissement, the lowest of the twenty, so evenings are quiet in a slightly emptied-out way rather than a residential one. Book between the Louvre and place Vendome if you want that quiet, or accept the noise closer to Chatelet. Either way the room will be small: 12 to 16 square metres is the central Paris norm at every star rating, and here you are paying the highest rate per square metre in the city.

The 2nd is 99 hectares, the smallest of the twenty, and you can cross it in fifteen minutes. Rue Montorgueil runs up the eastern side and is a working food street - fishmongers, cheese, a queue outside the bakery at 08:00 - rather than a restored one, and the covered passages off rue des Petits Champs are 19th-century shopping arcades with glass roofs, which is the correct thing to do with a wet afternoon in Paris.

It is also the financial district, so the western half around the Bourse is offices, and dead from Friday evening until Monday morning. The eastern edge along rue Saint-Denis has been a red-light street since the Renaissance and still is at the northern end, which is worth knowing before you book a rate that looks too good for the postcode.

What you get for the trade is a room a few minutes' walk from the 1st and the Marais at a rate closer to the 9th, with metro 3, 4, 8 and 9 crossing the district and RER A at Auber. Nothing here is a sight, which is exactly why it is cheaper.

The Marais does not stop at the boundary between the 4th and the 3rd - it just gets quieter. The northern half, the Haut Marais, has the Musee Picasso, the Musee Carnavalet's neighbours, the Marche des Enfants Rouges from 1615, and designer shops that are actually independent rather than a chain doing an impression of one.

It costs a little less than the 4th and it is a five-minute walk further from Notre-Dame - twenty minutes rather than ten. That is the whole difference, and for most people it is the better trade: you are still walking home from dinner, but the street outside the window is not a bar street.

The catches are minor and real. Metro coverage is at the edges rather than the middle: Arts et Metiers, Filles du Calvaire, Republique and Saint-Sebastien-Froissart ring it, so expect a five-minute walk to a station. The northern end towards Republique is ordinary Paris rather than medieval. And hotels here are small and boutique-priced, so there is little cheap stock when the city is full.

The 4th is the best single answer to where to stay in Paris, and the reason is geometry: Notre-Dame is ten minutes away, the Louvre fifteen, the Bastille ten in the other direction, and the restaurants and bars you will actually eat and drink in are on the same streets as the hotel. No other central district lets you spend three days without using the metro after dark.

It covers the lower Marais, the Ile de la Cite and the Ile Saint-Louis, so a third of what you came to see is inside the boundary. Rue des Rosiers and rue Vieille-du-Temple are the going-out core, the Pompidou is at the western edge, and the Jewish and gay quarters overlap through the middle of it. It is also one of the few parts of Paris where the shops open on a Sunday, which matters more than it sounds on a short trip.

The costs are real. The buildings are 17th century and older, so hotels are small, staircases are narrow, and a lift above the fourth floor is not a given - check before booking with a suitcase. Rooms on rue Vieille-du-Temple and the streets off it hear the bars until about 02:00 at weekends. And the rate matches the 1st without matching the space: a cheap room in the 4th is cheap because it faces a light well.

The 5th is the Roman city and the medieval university, and it is still the best-value central arrondissement. Rooms run noticeably under the 4th and the 1st for a walk that is only five minutes longer: Notre-Dame is across one bridge, the Jardin du Luxembourg is at the western edge, and the Pantheon, the Cluny museum and the Arenes de Lutece are all inside the district.

RER B stops at Saint-Michel and Luxembourg, which is the direct line to Charles de Gaulle, and metro 10 runs east-west across the touristed northern half. Everything else here is walking, which is the point - the streets between the Pantheon and rue Mouffetard are the part of Paris that looks most like the reason you came.

Two warnings. Rue de la Huchette and the lanes around it are a tourist-menu strip with fixed-price moussaka and touts at the door; walk five minutes uphill for the real thing. And the student quarter is now a memory rather than a fact - the district gentrified and the students moved to the 13th - so do not book here expecting cheap beer and late noise. It gets quiet after midnight.

The 6th is the one district where the cliche and the reality are the same building. The Jardin du Luxembourg is inside it and is the best park in central Paris. Rue de Buci and rue de Seine are galleries, food shops and restaurants at a density nowhere else manages. Notre-Dame is eighteen minutes on foot, the Louvre twenty-five, and the Latin Quarter starts at the eastern boundary.

What that costs is the highest price for an ordinary room in the city. A mid-range hotel here runs above a four-star in the 9th, and the difference buys you the address rather than the room, which will still be 14 square metres. The Cafe de Flore and Les Deux Magots charge accordingly for a coffee you can get for a third of the price one street back.

It is also quiet in the evening. This is a dinner-and-a-wine-bar district, not a going-out one: the boulevard Saint-Germain end goes still by midnight and the tourist strip along boulevard Saint-Michel is the one part to avoid eating in. Book here for a short trip where walking everywhere matters more than the rate.

Nobody regrets the daytime here. The Musee d'Orsay, the Rodin museum, the Invalides and the tower itself are all inside the arrondissement, the streets are wide and Haussmannian, and the Champ de Mars is a real park rather than a lawn to photograph.

The evening is the problem. This is the ministries, the National Assembly and the embassies, which means the working population leaves at 19:00 and takes the cafes with it. Rue Cler is close to the only proper food street in the district, and outside it you are choosing between a hotel restaurant and a metro ride. Notre-Dame is nearly forty minutes on foot, so the metro is not optional: line 8 and RER C do most of the work.

You also pay a view premium that buys very little. A room facing the tower costs roughly a third more than the same room in the 5th, and you can see the tower for free from half the city. Book here if the trip is museums and mornings, or if you are travelling with someone who will not walk far. Book the 5th or the 4th if dinner matters.

The 8th is where the expensive hotels are: avenue George V, avenue Montaigne, the palace hotels with a doorman and a rate to match. If someone else is paying, or if the trip is a specific occasion, it delivers exactly what it promises, and the Arc de Triomphe, the Grand Palais and place de la Concorde are all inside the boundary.

On any other budget it is the wrong district. Wikivoyage's own advice is to look in the neighbouring arrondissements for anything affordable. The Champs-Elysees itself is a wide avenue of chain stores, car showrooms and queues, and the rest of the 8th is ministries, embassies and corporate headquarters, which means the streets are handsome, orderly and completely empty on a Sunday.

It is also further out than it looks on a map: forty-five minutes on foot to Notre-Dame, so everything is metro 1 or RER A. Good for a business trip near La Defense or the exhibition halls. Poor for a first visit.

The 9th is where the mid-range hotels are, and there are a lot of them: this is the district the coach tours and the department stores share. Galeries Lafayette and Printemps are on boulevard Haussmann, the Opera Garnier is at the southern corner, and the passages and Grands Boulevards theatres run east from it.

The interesting half is the north. South Pigalle - SoPi, if you must - is now bars, small restaurants and the best cocktails in the city, on streets that were the fading sex trade twenty years ago and are half-and-half today. Boulevard de Clichy along the top boundary is still the sex shops and the strip clubs, and the blocks either side of place Pigalle are the ones to look at on a map before booking.

Between the two, the middle of the arrondissement is nothing much - offices, apartment blocks and the Saint-Lazare approaches. Rates reflect that, which is the reason to be here: a four-star in the 9th costs what a three-star costs in the 1st, and Notre-Dame is a forty-minute walk or four stops on metro 7.

The canal Saint-Martin is the reason to be here. Its banks are restaurants and cafes, the streets alongside close to traffic on Saturday afternoons and all day Sunday, and the stretch down to Republique carries the overflow of the 11th's bar scene at two-thirds of the Marais room rate. If you have already done the museums on a previous trip, this is a good place to spend a week.

The other half of the arrondissement is Gare du Nord and Gare de l'Est, 250 metres apart, and the blocks between and north of them are the reason the 10th has the reputation it has. It is not dangerous in the daytime and it is genuinely convenient - the Eurostar on foot, RER B to Charles de Gaulle in about 25 minutes - but the streets are grim, the hotels sell nothing but proximity, and it is not where you want to be walking at 01:00 with a wheeled bag.

So the district splits on which end you book. Anything between the canal and Republique is a fair recommendation. Anything within three streets of the two stations is a trade: you are buying the train, and paying for it in the walk home.

The 11th was factories and workers' housing, and nobody ever built it a monument. That is the whole trade: there is nothing here on a sightseeing list, and consequently the room rates are about a third under the Marais twenty minutes' walk away, and the restaurants are priced for people who live here.

What it does have is the highest concentration of places to eat and drink in the city, in two clusters - rue de Lappe and rue de la Roquette off the Bastille, and rue Oberkampf and rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud in the north. Republique and Bastille are both on the boundary, so metro 1, 5, 8, 9 and 11 are all a short walk, and the district is dense enough that everything inside it is walkable.

Book here on a second visit, or on a first visit if you would rather eat well than tick off the Louvre in the first 48 hours. Book a courtyard-facing room: at 41,000 residents per square kilometre this is the most crowded urban district in Europe, and the bar streets do not go quiet before 02:00 at weekends.

Almost everything worth booking in the 12th is in its first kilometre: the blocks around Gare de Lyon and Bastille, where metro 1 and 14 get you to Chatelet in five minutes and the walk to Notre-Dame is half an hour. Rates there run well under the 4th on the other side of the same square.

The rest of the district is long. It runs east through Daumesnil and Picpus and then becomes the Bois de Vincennes, which more than doubles its size and is a forest with a chateau in it. The Coulee verte Rene-Dumont, the elevated park that the New York High Line copied, starts behind the Opera Bastille and runs four and a half kilometres east, which is the best thing here and free.

What you do not get is a reason to be in the district itself. Bercy Village is a restored wine warehouse street with chain restaurants in it, the Cinematheque is excellent if you want a film, and beyond that the 12th is where Parisians live. Book the western end for the price and the trains; ignore anything advertised as the 12th that is out past Porte Doree.

The 13th does not look like Paris and that is the point of it. South of place d'Italie the avenues de Choisy and d'Ivry are the largest Chinatown in Europe - Vietnamese, Cambodian, Chinese and Laotian, in the ground floors of 1970s tower blocks - and it is where you eat for twelve euros in a city where that is otherwise difficult.

The rest is a working district: the Bibliotheque nationale and the Paris Rive Gauche development along the river, the Manufacture des Gobelins, and the Butte-aux-Cailles, a village of two-storey houses and cheap bars that survived the redevelopment and is the one genuinely pretty corner.

The cost is distance and appearance. Wikivoyage puts the walk from the Ile de la Cite at about forty minutes, which is accurate and pleasant along the Seine but not something you will do twice a day. Metro 14 from Olympiades reaches Chatelet in under ten minutes and is the reason this works at all. Book here for the food and the rate, not for the view from the window.

The 14th is the practical one. Denfert-Rochereau has RER B for Charles de Gaulle in one direction and the Orlybus to Orly from the same square, which no other district offers, and Gare Montparnasse for the TGV west is a few minutes north. If your trip involves trains or an early flight, this is the arrondissement that saves you an hour.

It is also where the catacombs are - six million people stacked in tunnels, and the one queue in Paris worth booking a slot for in advance. Boulevard du Montparnasse still has the big brasseries the 1920s made famous, La Coupole and Le Dome among them, which are large, expensive and coasting on the reputation. Rue Daguerre, two streets south, is where you should actually eat: a proper market street with a market on it.

The rest is residential, which shows in the rate - roughly half the 6th, twenty minutes' walk north. The northern edge around the station is 1970s concrete and the tower, and it is not a nice five minutes with a suitcase. Forty minutes on foot to Notre-Dame, so the metro is the daily habit.

The 15th is where 230,000 Parisians live and 150,000 work, and it was not built for visitors. Offices, 1970s tower blocks along the river at Front de Seine, the Parc des Expositions at Porte de Versailles, and a great many perfectly decent, perfectly boring streets. It is safe, it is quiet, and rooms cost less than across the boundary in the 7th, which is why the search results push it at you.

What the listings do not say is how far out most of it is. Notre-Dame is an hour on foot from the middle of the district, the Louvre longer, and there is nothing inside the boundary that a first-time visitor came to Paris for. Every day starts and ends on metro 8, 10 or 12, and the trade-fair calendar at Porte de Versailles spikes the rates without improving anything.

The honest exception is Grenelle, the north-east corner by Bir-Hakeim and Dupleix. That is genuinely ten to fifteen minutes from the Champ de Mars, and a hotel there is a reasonable way to be near the tower for less. Check the address against a map before you book: if it is south of rue de Vaugirard or west of the Parc Andre Citroen, you have booked a commute.

Trocadero is the photograph: the terrace at the Palais de Chaillot looks straight down at the Eiffel Tower across the river, and it is two minutes from the hotels on place du Trocadero. That view is the entire case for the 16th, and it is a fifteen-minute visit rather than a place to sleep.

The arrondissement behind it is where wealthy Parisians live. Passy and Auteuil are wide streets of apartment buildings with nothing at street level, the restaurants are few and shut early, and Sunday is silent. The rates are not low either - you are paying something close to central money for a district where every trip starts on metro 6 or 9, and Notre-Dame is fifty minutes away on foot.

More than half of it is the Bois de Boulogne, so 'in the 16th' covers addresses that are effectively out of the city. If the trip is Roland Garros, the Parc des Princes or a specific museum - the Marmottan has the best Monet collection anywhere - book it and enjoy the quiet. Otherwise the 7th next door has the same tower and more life, and the 9th costs less and is closer to everything.

Batignolles is the reason to look at the 17th. It has a square, a covered market, a park built over the old rail yards and a strip of bistros that price for the people who live above them. It is what visitors mean when they say they want a neighbourhood rather than a hotel district, and rooms cost roughly half the 8th, which starts one street to the south.

The rest of the arrondissement is two other places. Ternes and Monceau, in the south-west, are an extension of the 8th: handsome, expensive, and closed at the weekend. The Epinettes, at the eastern end, has more in common with the 18th next door - cheaper, rougher at the edges, and good for food if you are not precious about the street.

What none of it has is a sight. There is no museum and no monument in the 17th, and Notre-Dame is an hour away on foot, so a first visit spends its whole day on metro 2 or 13. What it does have is Porte Maillot, where the Charles de Gaulle and Beauvais coaches stop, which is worth an hour to anyone flying at dawn.

Montmartre earns its reputation. Sacre-Coeur sits 130 metres above the rest of the city, the streets around Abbesses and Lamarck-Caulaincourt are ordinary residential Paris with good bakeries in it, and the view from the basilica steps at sunset costs nothing. Rooms go for roughly half what the same room costs in the 4th.

The qualifications matter. Place du Tertre is a portrait-painter's queue and the restaurants circling it charge accordingly - eat one street down. The hill is a hill: stairs, or the funicular, and a suitcase makes the point. And the arrondissement is much bigger than the postcard. Its eastern side, around Barbes, Chateau Rouge and the Goutte d'Or, is a working immigrant quarter that is fine by day and not what most visitors are expecting after dark, while the southern boundary along boulevard de Clichy is strip clubs that work tourists hard.

Book west or north-west of the hill - Abbesses, Lamarck, the streets towards place de Clichy - and check the address on a map, not on the hotel's description of it. Metro 12 and 4 both reach the centre in about twenty minutes, and Gare du Nord is walkable, which is worth something if you arrive by Eurostar.

The 19th is a good district to live in and a poor one to visit. The Parc de la Villette holds the Cite des Sciences, the Philharmonie and a summer open-air cinema; the Buttes-Chaumont is the best park in Paris, a quarry rebuilt as cliffs and a lake; and two canals cross the middle of it. With children and a week, this is a reasonable base.

On a short trip it is the wrong side of a long metro ride. Notre-Dame is an hour on foot. Nothing on a first visit's list is inside the boundary. And the hotels that show up cheapest here are chains at Porte de la Villette and Porte de Pantin, which are ring-road junctions with a tram stop, not neighbourhoods - the price is low because the location is bad, and the saving is roughly the cost of the metro tickets you will buy.

Wikivoyage names the 18th, 19th and 20th as the arrondissements widely seen as the least safe in Paris, with the caveat that it varies street by street and that daytime is generally fine. Around Stalingrad and the northern canal that reputation is earned. Book here for the parks, on a repeat visit, with a map open.

Pere-Lachaise is inside the 20th and is free, which makes it the best-value morning in Paris - Chopin, Wilde, Piaf and Morrison in seventy thousand graves under old trees. Above it, Belleville and Menilmontant are where the city's Chinese, Tunisian and Algerian kitchens are, and where a full dinner still costs fifteen euros.

This is a working district in the middle of changing, which is Wikivoyage's phrase, not ours: gritty in parts, gentrifying in others, and genuinely good at night if what you want is a small music venue and a beer that is not six euros. Rue de Belleville climbs to one of the two views over the whole city that is not the Sacre-Coeur.

The reasons not to book are practical. Hotel stock is thin and mostly two-star, so the choice is small. Notre-Dame is fifty minutes on foot and the metro is a daily habit - line 2, 3 and 11 all cross it. And the 20th sits with the 18th and 19th on the list of arrondissements Paris itself considers least safe after dark, which in practice means the streets east of Menilmontant rather than the whole district.