An in Depth Look into France Capital Paris and its Tourism, as best Tourists destination in 2024

Paris is the capital and largest city of France. 

With an official estimated population of 2,102,650 residents in January 2023 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), Paris is the fourth-largest city in the European Union and the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2022. Since the 17th century, Paris has been one of the world’s major centres of finance, commerce, culture, fashion, and gastronomy. 

The City of Paris is the centre of the Île-de-France region, or Paris Region, with an official estimated population of 12,271,794 inhabitants in January 2023, or about 19% of the population of France. The Paris Region had a GDP of €765 billion (US$1.064 trillion, PPP) in 2021, the highest in the European Union. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit Worldwide Cost of Living Survey, in 2022, Paris was the city with the ninth-highest cost of living in the world.

In January 2016, the Métropole du Grand Paris, or simply Grand Paris, came into existence. It is an administrative structure for co-operation between the City of Paris and its nearest suburbs. It includes the City of Paris, plus the communes of the three departments of the inner suburbs, Hauts-de-Seine, Seine-Saint-Denis and Val-de-Marne, plus seven communes in the outer suburbs, including Argenteuil in Val d’Oise and Paray-Vieille-Poste in Essonne, which were added to include the major airports of Paris. The Metropole covers 814 km² (314 sq mi). In 2015, it had a population of 6.945 million persons.

Tourism continued to recover in the Paris region in 2022, increasing to 44 million visitors, an increase of 95 percent over 2021, but still 13 percent lower than in 2019. Greater Paris, comprising Paris and its three surrounding departments, received a record 38 million visitors in 2019, measured by hotel arrivals. These included 12.2 million French visitors. Of the foreign visitors, the greatest number came from the United States (2.6 million), United Kingdom (1.2 million), Germany (981 thousand) and China (711 thousand). 

In 2018, measured by the Euromonitor Global Cities Destination Index, Paris was the second-busiest airline destination in the world, with 19.10 million visitors, behind Bangkok (22.78 million) but ahead of London (19.09 million). In 2016, 393,008 workers in Greater Paris, or 12.4 percent of the total workforce, were engaged in tourism-related sectors such as hotels, catering, transport and leisure. 

Paris’ top cultural attractions in 2022 were the Louvre Museum (7.7 million visitors), the Eiffel Tower (5.8 million visitors), the Musée d’Orsay (3.27 million visitors) and the Centre Pompidou (3 million visitors).In 2019, Greater Paris had 2,056 hotels, including 94 five-star hotels, with a total of 121,646 rooms. In 2019, in addition to the hotels, Greater Paris had 60,000 homes registered with Airbnb. Under French law, renters of these units must pay the Paris tourism tax. The company paid the city government 7.3 million euros in 2016.