Sainte-Chapelle

Sainte-Chapelle tickets: which one to buy

The chapel has a timed ticket and a security screening shared with the law courts, which means two lines: one to be screened and one to enter. Booking a slot online halves the wait and is essential in summer. The joint ticket with the Conciergerie next door, the medieval palace and revolutionary prison, costs only a little more than the chapel alone and is the standard buy. Guided tours cost several times the entry and buy explanation of the 1,113 glass panels, which repay it;

small-group tours before general opening exist and are the only way to see the upper chapel without a crowd. Evening concerts of Vivaldi and Mozart are held in the upper chapel through much of the year, ticketed separately by concert promoters; the acoustics are modest but sitting under the glass for an hour after dark is a different experience from the daytime visit. The Paris Museum Pass covers entry but not the queue, so a timed reservation still helps.

Visiting Sainte-Chapelle: what to see

Louis IX built the chapel between 1238 and 1248 to hold the Crown of Thorns and other Passion relics he had bought from the emperor in Constantinople, at a price several times the cost of the building itself. It has two floors. The lower chapel, for palace servants, is low, painted blue and red, and works as an antechamber. Then a tight spiral stair delivers you into the upper chapel, and the effect is deliberate: fifteen windows 15 metres high with almost no wall between them, so that the stone seems to have been dissolved.

Two-thirds of the glass is original thirteenth-century work, and it reads as a single Bible, 1,113 scenes running from Genesis along the nave to the Passion in the apse, with the great rose of the Apocalypse added in the fifteenth century over the west door. The relics survived the Revolution, which gutted the building's furnishings, and are now kept at Notre-Dame.

Sainte-Chapelle opening hours and the best time to go

Open daily from mid-morning to early evening, with later closing in summer and a shorter day from November to March. Light is everything here. A bright day makes the glass blaze, an overcast one leaves it flat, so watch the forecast and go when the sun is out; late morning and mid-afternoon both work, with the rose window best in the late afternoon when the sun is in the west. The chapel is small and fills quickly, and the middle of the day in summer is genuinely crowded with little room to stand back.

Binoculars help with the upper registers, which are 12 metres up, and there are boards in the chapel that decode the panels. The spiral stair is narrow and there is no lift. Allow forty minutes, an hour with the Conciergerie added. Photography without flash is allowed. The Conciergerie next door is entered from the same courtyard and takes another forty minutes, and the joint ticket has no time limit.