From Skylines to Skulls | A Slice of Paris
- Di von Essen
- 1 hour ago
- 3 min read
Of everything we did in Paris, two moments won't let go of me: one sky-high, one deep underground.
Paris has a way of making you feel small in two completely different directions. Look up, and there's the Eiffel Tower, all iron lace and impossible scale, doing exactly what it was built to do: dominate the skyline. Look down, and there's a version of the city that has nothing to do with cafés and boulevards at all: a silent labyrinth of tunnels, stacked floor to ceiling with the bones of six million Parisians. We didn't plan it this way, but our trip ended up shaped by these two extremes: one landmark reaching for the sky, one hiding beneath the streets.
The Eiffel Tower is the one everybody knows, and I'll admit we never actually went up it. We circled it instead: from the Trocadéro across the river, where the whole tower fills your view and every second tourist is mid-selfie; from the grass of the Champ de Mars at night, when it does its hourly sparkle, a five-minute shimmer of white lights that starts on the hour and sends a little ripple of gasps through the park each time; and from the SkyBar high above the rooftops, cocktail in hand, watching it glow gold against the dark and float above a sea of grey zinc roofs. At the Trocadéro, the fountains below the terrace were lit up too, so the tower had company: light bouncing off water, off glass, off a few thousand phone screens all pointed the same direction. Every angle gave us something different.
Looking back, I think skipping the climb was the right call, not a missed one. Once you're up on the tower, you're looking at Paris. The view is the city spread out below you, not the tower itself. From the ground, the Eiffel Tower stays the star of the show. You get to watch it change with the light, sparkle on the hour, and anchor every skyline photo you take for the rest of the trip. If you do want to go up, book well ahead (tickets sell out), but don't feel short-changed if, like us, you decide the best view of the Eiffel Tower is simply of it, not from it.
Then there's the Catacombs, which might be the strangest thing we did in Paris, and the one I keep thinking about.
Nothing quite prepares you for walking down a narrow spiral staircase into cool, still air and coming face to face with walls built entirely out of femurs and skulls, arranged with a kind of eerie neatness by the men who moved them there in the late 1700s, when Paris's overflowing cemeteries had become a public health crisis. The bones aren't just piled up either; they're arranged into deliberate patterns, long walls of femurs stacked like firewood with rows of skulls set into them, occasionally forming a cross or a heart, which somehow makes it more unsettling rather than less. It's dim, it's quiet, and it is genuinely cold. The temperature sits around 14°C year-round, so take a jacket even in the height of summer.
What really stayed with me, though, was losing all sense of direction. The official visitor route only covers around 1.5 kilometres of tunnel, but the full network beneath the city stretches for hundreds of kilometres, and walking it feels like far more than a kilometre and a half. It's slow going, single file, past bone wall after bone wall, with no real sense of how far you've come. When you finally climb back up into daylight, you don't emerge anywhere near where you went in. The exit drops you on a completely different street, blocks from the entrance, and for a disorienting moment you have to remind yourself which way is which, and which century. Book your tickets online in advance; the Catacombs cap numbers underground, and the queue for walk-ups can eat half your day.
Sky and underground, tower and tomb. Paris doesn't mind holding both at once. One landmark asks to be admired from a distance, glittering and enormous, while the other pulls you in close and swallows your sense of direction entirely. We left the city with sore feet, cold fingers, and two completely different kinds of awe: one from standing in a park at night watching a giant iron tower shimmer against the sky, the other from standing in the dark, entirely turned around, surrounded by six million people who got to Paris a very long time before we did.
Source: intouch Magazine, Issue #122, Spring 2026, pp. 34–35.
