Best Plan for a Quick Visit to the Louvre with No Lines!
Paris is big and full of incredible things to see, so if you are challenged for time and you want to know how to visit the Louvre in 3 hours, your full plan plus itinerary is right here! You’ll want to plan everything to make the most of the time you have, because the Louvre is a beast.
It took me 3 times to figure out the best way to visit the Louvre for first-timers. The first time I wandered aimlessly without a plan, and missed some things I really wanted to see. The second time I tried to use the Louvre’s audioguide and map and do it on my own. Sounds good, right? Also a disaster. But the third time was a charm! Here’s what I did.
How to Visit the Louvre in 3 hours
Start with a guided tour of the Louvre highlights
Why have a guided tour? The reasons to have a guide are many.
1) No line! A tour will save you a ton of time, and stress. No figuring out which entrance, no endless waiting while you wonder “Is this the right line??” while your precious minutes tick away. Even “skip-the-line” tickets have a line!
2) You’ll see the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, the Winged Victory, and all the absolute “must-sees” that everyone will be asking if you saw. Guides know their way around and have everything all figured out so you see the maximum number of famous works in the shortest amount of time.
3) You will not get lost between one thing and another. This is a real problem. The Louvre is not, I repeat NOT laid out in any kind of intuitive way. You can’t blame it, though, because it was designed as a palace, not an art museum. Trying to find where you are and how to get to what you want to see can be a complete nightmare – even with a map.
4) You will learn much more than you ever would without a guide. You’ll get fascinating history, stories, and context from someone who loves art. You will also avoid the audio tour, which to be honest is the worst audioguide for a museum I’ve ever experienced. It cuts out, the device is twitchy, it’s hard to find what you’re looking for, and the information it gives is not very detailed.
Plus you have to wait on line to get the recorder, and then go back to return your equipment when you’re done, taking precious time. Knowing what you are seeing as told to you from a real live person will make for a truly enriching experience that you will always remember, and will be a highlight of your trip to Paris!
You can take the same guided tour of the Louvre highlights I did. It was well organized, and the guide was charming, knowledgeable, and shared lots of stories and hidden gems.
Planning Your Visit
If you are in the process of planning your Paris itinerary, and you really want to see the Louvre, it’s a good idea to start with your Louvre visit and plan around it from there. Here are some things to consider.
✅ Manage your expectations
Remember that the Louvre is the largest museum on Earth, covering 8,160,000 square feet (758,000 m2), and it is visited by more than 9 million people every year. So, there will be lots of people, especially near the most famous artworks, like the Mona Lisa which receives a staggering 20,000 visitors a day! If you understand this going in, and go with the flow, you’ll have a much better time.
🔍 Explore the Collection Online
There’s no better way to get excited about your trip than to brows the collections of the Louvre online, which you can do at the Louvre’s official website. You can also check out what special exhibitions and events are happening at the museum.
⌚️ Time of day
Try to avoid the busiest times like weekends, and mid-days. If your schedule permits, you’ll have a better experience on weekday mornings, than mid-day on Saturday.
The Louvre is open from 9-6 Wednesday through Monday, and is CLOSED ON TUESDAYS.
🖼 Choose Your Tour
There are many tours to choose from – private tours, small group tours, and tours of varying lengths. If you only have 3-4 hours, I suggest taking the highlights tour that lasts about an hour and a half, and then if you have any extra time at the end you can continue on your own.
🚺🚹 Use the Bathroom
Make sure to use the bathroom before you start your tour. Your guide should give you time to do this. The restrooms are located on the ground floor across the open space from the spiral staircase.
🗺 Get a Map
Free maps are available. Be sure to take note of where you are going on the map, and mark on the map anything that you see that you may want to come back to after the tour is over. You may think you’ll remember, but mark it just to be safe.
👀 Look Around
You should have an ear piece so you can hear your guide. You can wander a short distance and look at some other artworks while they are speaking, but don’t lose your guide! It’s easier to do than you think. The guide should have a colored flag to help you spot them.
⌛️ After the tour
When your tour is over, talk to your guide, show them any area(s) you’ve marked on the map, and ask them how to get back. On our group tour (which was on a Saturday afternoon), we didn’t get in the thick of the crowd to see the Mona Lisa up close, so a couple people went back so they could spend some more time there.
💶 Tip Your Guide
If your guide did a great job, don’t forget to give them a tip! A few euros is enough, and you’ll make their day.
🛍 Remember Lunch and the Gift Shop
Be sure that you plan in time to visit the excellent gift shops and/or cafés if you want to. The shops that are in the long corridor leading to the spiral staircase are much better than the smaller shops inside the museum itself.
And the café right off the gallery where you’ll see Liberty Leading the People is iconic. An absolute perfect spot for a sandwich or pastry while you enjoy the atmosphere and people watch.
🗝 The One Drawback to a Tour
Do note that with a guided group tour, you may not have a physical ticket, which means that you cannot leave through any exit and come back. Once you’re out, you’re out. There are a few places in the museum, when you are trying to go from one place to another where the quickest route is to leave and reenter. This is not an option for you if you don’t have that paper ticket. That’s the one drawback to this plan. But there is so very much to see, you won’t leave feeling deprived.
My Itinerary
10:00am
I got to the meeting spot about half an hour early, and enjoyed a cappuccino at the Nemours Cafe . The café looks right out at the meeting spot which is in the Place Colette. You can pay a few euros more to sit inside the cafe at a table which we did because the day was cold when we took our tour!
We also had time to browse an interesting little shop that sells handcrafted miniatures and all kinds of interesting little knick-knacks.
*The meeting place may change depending on the specific tour you take.
10:30am
Our guide showed up right on time. She had an orange Get Your Guide flag and we spotted her right away. We all got our ear pieces and made sure we could hear her. It was about 3 minutes until we were inside the museum.
10:45am – 1:00pm
Once we arrived, everyone took a quick trip to the restrooms and we were off! The tour took about 2 and a half hours and covered lots of highlights like the newly excavated foundations of the old fort; an Egyptian sphinx, the Venus de Milo, Nike (Winged Victory), Minerva, Hermaphrodite, the huge painting of the last supper in the Mona Lisa gallery, the Mona Lisa, and Liberty Leading the People, the gallery showcasing the jewels of Louis XIV, and more!
We got lots of interesting tidbits like, did you know the Venus de Milo used to have a golden tiara and an arm band? And the Mona Lisa was stolen, and vanished for two whole years? I won’t ruin the story for you here, but if you want the spoiler you can check out the whole story about how the Mona Lisa was stolen and eventually recovered.
[If you’re on a rigid 3 hour schedule, here’s where your visit ends]
1:00-1:30pm
After the tour, we stopped at the cafe and got water and a snack.
1:30-3:30pm
Then we spent another two hours exploring without any pressure to find the things that everyone wants to see. It was amazing.
Of course, you could spend open to close for a week and probably not see everything. But we felt very satisfied that we’d gotten a good taste – just enough to whet our appetite for trip #4 which we’re looking forward to already!
Have a Great Time at the Louvre!
I hope this article helped you solidify your plan of how to visit the Louvre in 3 hours. It really can be done with a little forethought and planning. Of course if you are a real art lover, three hours will be only a tantalizing glimpse at what the Louvre holds, but it’s also a great excuse to come back to Paris!
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