City Tour, Seine Cruise and Eiffel Tower 2nd Floor (reserved access)

Overview

Five hours combining a panoramic coach circuit of central Paris, a one-hour glazed Seine cruise and reserved lift access to the second floor of the Eiffel Tower, with a host on hand throughout.

What to expect

• Meet the host and start the recorded commentary on your phone.
• The coach circuit past the Opéra, the Champs-Élysées, Saint-Germain and the Louvre.
• Your cruise ticket handed to you on board the coach.
• An hour on the water under the glazed roof.
• The lift to the second floor on reserved access.
• Time at the top before the day ends.

The tower was only ever meant to last twenty years

This is the fact that reframes everything you are looking at. When it went up for the 1889 exhibition, Eiffel's concession ran for twenty years. After that the structure was to pass to the city, which fully intended to take it down.

It was not loved. A good deal of educated Paris considered it an industrial eyesore imposed on a city of stone, and its removal was treated as a matter of when, not whether.

Radio saved it

Eiffel understood the problem and spent those twenty years making his tower too useful to demolish. Science was the strategy, and wireless was the winning card.

From the late 1890s experimenters used it as an aerial, and in 1903 the military engineer Gustave Ferrié established a radio station at the base. A structure three hundred metres tall was the best transmitting mast in France, and no replacement existed.

When the concession lapsed in 1909 the argument had been won: you do not demolish your army's principal aerial. During the First World War the station intercepted German military transmissions, and by then any question of dismantling had disappeared entirely.

The antennas are still up there. The tower has grown taller several times since 1889 purely by having new broadcast equipment fitted to its summit.

Three things in one day

The three parts do not compete for the same hours: the coach covers ground, the boat covers the river, and the Tower is a fixed place at a fixed time.

Your cruise ticket is issued to you on the coach rather than bought separately, and the second-floor lift is held in advance. The summit is not part of this.

Practicalities

Bring earphones and a charged phone — the commentary runs on your own device and nothing is handed out.

In heavy traffic the coach may be replaced by a minivan. It is the same route and the same commentary, but the open upper deck is not guaranteed on a bad day for the roads.