Illumination Tour and Eiffel Tower 3rd Floor (reserved access)

Overview

An evening combining an illumination circuit of Paris by open-top coach with a reserved-access lift ticket to the third floor of the Eiffel Tower — the summit — and a host to handle the boarding.

What to expect

• Meet the host and start the recorded commentary on your phone.
• The coach circuit past the lit façades, including Notre-Dame and the Moulin Rouge.
• Transfer to the Tower and the security screening at the base.
• The lift up, changing cars partway for the final ascent.
• Time at the summit looking out over the lit city.
• The descent and the end of the evening.

Gustave Eiffel kept a flat at the top

Just below the summit platform, Eiffel built himself a small apartment. Not an office suite — an actual set of rooms with wallpaper, wooden furniture, cabinets and a piano, at a height where the rest of Paris had nothing but sky.

It was the most sought-after address in the city and he never rented it out, though wealthy Parisians offered him a great deal for a single night. He kept it to work in and to receive people he wanted to impress, which was most of scientific Europe.

In September 1889 he received Thomas Edison there, who arrived with a phonograph as a gift. The room has been restored and you can look into it now, with figures of Eiffel, his daughter Claire and Edison arranged as they might have been that afternoon.

The tower was his laboratory as much as his monument

The summit was not decoration for him. Eiffel ran meteorological instruments up there, studied wind pressure on the structure, and later used the tower for experiments in aerodynamics.

That mattered more than it sounds: a structure with scientific uses was a structure with arguments in its favour, and Eiffel spent the early years making sure his tower was demonstrably useful as well as tall.

What the summit gives you, and the risk attached

The third floor stands at roughly two hundred and seventy-six metres. At night the effect is entirely different from daylight — the city becomes a dark field with lines of light through it, and the pattern of the boulevards shows more clearly than it does by day.

The honest caveat: the summit closes in high wind, at short notice, while the lower floors carry on. It is the most exposed part of the structure and the decision is made on the day. If it is shut when you arrive, the evening still runs, but the top will not be part of it.

Reserved access, and what it does not cover

Your lift is held, so there is no ticket queue and no general lift line. Everyone still passes the security screening at the base, whatever they hold, and at busy hours that takes time.

Practicalities

It is cold up there. The summit is open to the air and the wind at that height is a different proposition from the street — take considerably more than you think, even in summer, and bring your own earphones for the coach.