In a real sense this is a macro event. Europe no longer wants the mass tourism and dollars.
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Not absolutely sure it says that exactly. They could handle more but, like other things: They don’t want to pay for the upgrades necessary. But, there probably is some absolute level of tolerability or absorption for “outta towners” tramping around an ancient city with its own character, vibe and population who are not tourists and not in the tourism industry.
But in the larger sense not related to a story about tourism and museums… it looks like the world is doing quite well. I’ve never really heard existential complaints about "too many people with too much money willing to spend it on traveling to expensive places to do, let’s face it, tertiary things like hang around museums and similar places. Much less poverty out there I guess. Less global warming or effects thereof, too. Less “Western Civ = Bad” Less “Europe is dying.”
Was there any bad news in that story?
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non capisco
ventiventi
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I visited the Louvre in 1966. There were no crowds.
At the center of it all is the Mona Lisa — a 16th-century portrait that draws modern-day crowds more akin to a celebrity meet-and-greet than an art experience.
I found the Mona Lisa most disappointing, too much promotion to live up to. I had the same reaction with Niagara Falls. The Venus de Milo was the opposite. Can you believe that a piece of stone can be more erotic than the best Paris nightclub shows?
One thing is miss is the Eurail Pass of 1966. You paid a reasonable fee and got to ride most trains in Europe with no reservation required. My pass was for three months. Believe it or not, my first Eurail Pass ride was on the streetcar in Lisbon on the way to Estoril to buy a self bailer made by Sr. Duarte Bello. This trip to Portugal is what made me fall in love with the country.
The 21st. Century Eurail Pass is a Masterwork of Complexity. When I decided to come to Portugal I had high hopes of using Eurail Pass to tour Europe. I tried to take the train from Berlin to Porto. When I told the ticket agent that it was too expensive, she suggested flying which I did.
The Captain
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Totally agree. Surprised me. Unexpected.
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The same is true for me in 1974.
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Same for me when my ex-fiance and I visited Paris to escape the Silver Jubilee Celebrations back in the UK. Mind you, that was back in 1977…darn near half a century ago!
In case you’re wondering if things might’ve changed a tad, I was there Spring of 2022 (Paris, not the Louvre itself…already done it) It had…crowds everywhere!!
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I really enjoy how different life was in Paris. We went to the bakery [“boulangerie”] The had bread in different shape and sizes. They were in wire baskets that hung from the walls. Also small neighborhood shops sold table wine by the liter. One also had to pay a bottle deposit. The wine was quite drinkable but then I am no wine connoisseur.
There were many small eclectic hotels and the rooms were cheap. I think I might be disappointed if I returned there.
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France is consistently one of the most-visited countries in the world, typically welcoming over 80 million international tourists annually. In 2024, France saw a record number of over 100 million international visitors, according to Monaco Life, making it a “record year” for French tourism, says Campus France.
CA gets 280 million and FL 180 million per year. Give or take because those were stats closer to the pandemic.
I think I’ve been to the Louvre 3 or 4 times in my life, once or twice before they built the pyramid entrance and once or twice after they built it. The first time I saw that pyramid, I found it to be very incongruous (to say the least!) to the general building style there. But it’s grown on me, and the entrance facility underneath is terrific and very necessary. One time on a business trip to Milano, a colleague and I had the weekend free, and he’d never been to Paris. So we took the Thursday night sleeper train* to Paris, spend Friday, Saturday, and most of Sunday in Paris. We went to the Louvre and literally, at a super-fast pace, went through the whole place in a little under 3 hours. I wonder if that might be a record, LOL. I don’t recommend doing the Louvre so quickly, it’s much more enjoyable at a leisurely pace, even over 2 or 3 days if you are a true art lover. But we were trying to hit all the major Paris stuff in one weekend. We skipped the Eiffel Tower, even though our hotel was only a short walk away, because it felt like a tourist trap to us.
* The sleeper train was an experience in itself, we had 6 people in our compartment. Unfortunately one of them had severe body odor, so my colleague surreptitiously sprayed his deodorant roughly in his direction periodically. We made it through the night with some sleep and arrived at Gare de Lyon (IIRC) in the morning.
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Went thru the Louvre in a guided tour last September(2024).
The guide was well worth it. Found out all sorts of stuff about various paintings including Mona L.
www.Viator.com has been a great source of local tours for me.
3-course dinner on the Seine
Fast track with guide to the top of the Eiffel.
Really enjoyed the Musé d’Orsey ; Van Gogh and all the Impressionists.
Left that afternoon on the Fenix Boat and Barge eBike Tour ending in Brugge 15 days later. . . . yawn, burp, scratch
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It’s awful. I can’t imagine the thought behind designing it, or those who had to approve it, or the public when it first saw the plans, or anyone in their right minds. (Yes, it has won some awards, and that mystifies me as well.)
It’s called VFA syndrome, or Very Famous Architect Syndrome. Anything created by a sufficiently famous architect is accepted as awesome no matter what.
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It’s a wonderful place to hear the sound of the city.
my cousins got me a ticket to Aida at La Scala de Milano. EPIC and I don’t even like opera.
The Captain
Given how much art Napoleon looted from Egypt that ended up in the Louvre, a pyramid entrance seems appropriate. One of the things that I like about it is that the glass structure is fairly unobtrusive when seen from a distance.
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Maybe not…or not as much as you expect. My most recent trip (mentioned upstream) was my only trip to France since coming to the US in the 1980s. I too expected a lot of change. For sure, there’s more development, crowds, architectural excrescences etc on the main drags but there are still areas that still capture the Belle Epoque feeling a bit. This recent trip, we were there for just 3 days (a scientific meeting for the husband) and I decided that I didn’t fancy doing “the sights” as I could look at them online without the crowds, so I set out from our hotel on the Champs Elysee of a morning and just wandered around. Didn’t take much more than 2 or 3 blocks to find myself in little streets and squares that the developers and tourists hadn’t spotted…yet.
On one sortie, I found this gem
I’m a sucker for churches and churchyards (especially in England where there’s a bit of age and the history of a culture…my culture…to view) but this one did the business very nicely.
Tyler Cowen on Paris:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/06/my-paris-delta.html
I have not been here since 2019, so here are the trends I am noticing:
1. Vastly more shops are open on Sundays than before.
2. Central Paris continues to evolve into a nearly bilingual city. It is not quite Amsterdam or Stockholm, but getting there. And the Parisians do not seem to mind speaking English.
3. There are more and more non-European restaurants of many kinds. From a walking-by perusal of menus and clienteles, they seem quite good and serious on the whole.
4. It is increasingly difficult to find a gas station in the city (before returning a rental car).
5. An amazingly high percentage of young women have publicly visible tattoos. I do not understand the logic here. I do (partially) understand tattoos as an act of rebellion, differentiation, or counter-signaling. I do not understand tattoos as an act of conformity.
6. Smoking has almost disappeared here. I saw plenty of young people vaping in Reims, but not the same in Paris.
7. Paris now has Rainier cherries in June, a sign of encroaching civiliation.
8. High-quality bookshops, with beautifully displayed titles and covers, still can be found frequently.
9. I had never seen the area near the Bibliotheque National before, it is excellent. I saw this Indian guy in concert there, after o3 recommended that I go.
10. Paris is doing just fine.
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This NYT piece looks at the competition to do some work to alleviate the overcrowding and other problems at the Louvre.
https://archive.is/Fl4BG
France on Friday started an architectural competition for the daunting task of expanding the Louvre in Paris, in a bid to ease overcrowding at the world’s biggest and most visited museum.
The project, which will create a new entrance and give the Mona Lisa a new exhibition space, was first announced in January by President Emmanuel Macron. He set the ambitious target of welcoming 12 million visitors per year — three million more than today — while also solving crowd-management headaches at the museum.
The architectural competition will be decided by a 21-person international jury, which will choose five finalists in October. A winner will be announced in early 2026, according to the Louvre.
Or, they could take a page from Disney’s park playbook, and keep raising admission prices until the crowd thins out.
Steve
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…or they and many other cultural treasure houses can simply remove all their “bucket list” pieces to a new building modeled on Disneyland’s zillion person/hour flow through rides, charge enough to pay for everything in the real museum as well as the bucklist stuff.
I remember being gobsmacked on my first visit to the Louvre, seeing the hordes fighting and pushing for their one second chance to snap a shot of monalisa, and just steps away, literally unvisited and unseen, were such da Vinci wonders as this
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