How tall is Notre-Dame de Paris?

How tall is Notre-Dame de Paris?

Notre-Dame de Paris has two height figures that people commonly quote. Its twin west towers, the flat-topped belfries that define the cathedral's front, rise to 69 m (226 ft), the height used on this site. Above the crossing of the nave and transepts stands a slender timber spire, or flèche, that reaches about 96 m (315 ft). The towers are stone and medieval; the spire is oak and lead, designed in the nineteenth century, destroyed in the 2019 fire and rebuilt to the same form by 2024.

This site uses the towers because they are the cathedral's permanent, structural top and the part visitors can climb. The spire is a lightweight crown that has been built, removed and rebuilt three times in 800 years.

Two towers that are not quite twins

The towers were the last major part of the cathedral to be completed. The south tower went up first, between about 1220 and 1240, and the north tower followed between about 1235 and 1250. Seen straight on from the square in front, the newer north tower is visibly a little broader, and its buttress is larger. Neither tower ever received a spire. Whatever the original intention, the builders finished them as square belfries with open tops, and that blunt, horizontal silhouette became one of the most recognizable shapes in Europe.

The towers have a practical role too: they hold the cathedral's bells. The north tower houses a framework supporting eight large bells, and the great bourdon bell hangs in the south tower. During the 2019 fire, the threat to that bell frame was the most dangerous moment of the night. Firefighters feared that if the burning timber gave way and the bells fell, the north tower could collapse and take the south tower with it, so a squad volunteered to fight the fire from inside the towers. The stone towers survived intact, and with them the cathedral's 69 m height.

The spire: built three times

Notre-Dame's first spire was raised between 1220 and 1230 over the crossing. It served as a bell tower and reached about 78 m from the church floor to its point. Centuries of weather weakened it, and it was taken down in 1786. For decades the cathedral had no spire at all.

During the great restoration that followed the success of Victor Hugo's 1831 novel Notre-Dame de Paris, the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc designed a new, more ornate flèche inspired by the spire of Orléans Cathedral. It was unveiled on 18 August 1859, carved from Champagne oak and sheathed in roughly 250 tons of lead, and at 96 m it stood 18 m higher than its predecessor. Sixteen copper statues of the apostles and evangelists stepped down its base; the figure of St Thomas, patron of architects, was given Viollet-le-Duc's features and turned to look up at the spire.

On the evening of 15 April 2019, fire broke out in the roof timbers. At 19:50 the spire collapsed through the vault, sending a fireball through the attic. The statues had been removed for restoration four days earlier and escaped. After a debate about whether to build a modern spire, France chose to reconstruct Viollet-le-Duc's design. A thousand oak trees were selected from French forests in 2021 for the roof and spire. Construction of the third spire began in 2022, the new gilded copper rooster was placed on the summit on 16 December 2023, and the finished spire was unveiled in February 2024, back at its 96 m height.

Eight centuries of construction

Building began in 1163 under Bishop Maurice de Sully, with the cornerstone laid in the presence of King Louis VII and Pope Alexander III. The choir came first, completed by about 1177, followed by the nave and its flying buttresses by around 1200. The west façade was largely complete by the mid-1240s, and the towers were finished by about 1250. Work on the transept façades, the rose windows and the chapels continued into the fourteenth century, and the cathedral is generally described as completed in 1345.

Notre-Dame was among the first great churches to use flying buttresses, which carry the outward push of the stone vaults to supports outside the walls. That allowed taller, thinner walls with larger windows. In the fourteenth century the original buttresses were replaced with larger ones whose reach at the east end is about 15 m. Laser scans by the art historian Andrew Tallon suggested that the upper structure had barely moved in 800 years, evidence that the buttresses were part of the plan from the start.

How Notre-Dame compares with other cathedrals

Notre-Dame is famous for its proportions and sculpture, not for record height. Several cathedrals built later or with taller spires easily surpass it.

Notre-Dame's spire at 96 m matches the height of London's Big Ben almost exactly, while its 69 m towers are just a few meters shorter than the Taj Mahal at 73 m. Within Paris, the Eiffel Tower at 330 m is almost five times taller than the cathedral's towers, and the Arc de Triomphe at 49.54 m is about 20 m shorter. You can stand any of these side by side in the 3D height comparison tool.

The 2019 fire and the restoration

The fire destroyed most of the wooden roof, known as "the forest" because of its dense medieval oak framing, and the spire. About one third of the roof survived. Several sections of the stone vault collapsed, letting burning debris fall into the nave, but most of the rib vaulting held and protected the interior. The three thirteenth-century rose windows survived, as did the main altar and cross. The roof had been covered with more than 400 tonnes of lead, and its melting spread contaminated dust around the Île de la Cité, which led to delayed clean-ups and criticism.

The restoration took a little over five years and is estimated to have cost about $739 million, funded largely by donations. The cathedral reopened with ceremonies on 7 and 8 December 2024, attended by world leaders, and the Crown of Thorns relic returned on 13 December. The apostle and evangelist statues went back around the base of the spire in April 2025. Because the roof and spire were reproduced in their nineteenth-century form, Notre-Dame's heights are the same as before the fire.

Rebuilding the spire to its old height meant finding timber of the right size. The thousand oaks chosen in 2021 had trunks between 50 and 90 cm across and usable lengths of 8 to 14 m, and many were several hundred years old. Once felled, they had to dry for 12 to 18 months before carpenters could shape them, and new trees were planted to replace them. The result is a spire built with the same material and essentially the same geometry as Viollet-le-Duc's, which is why its height of about 96 m could be restored rather than reinterpreted.

Famous moments at Notre-Dame's heights

The towers and spire have been the stage for some memorable episodes, several of which show off their height.

• 1786: the weakened medieval spire is taken down, leaving the cathedral without a flèche for more than 70 years.
• 1790s: during the Revolution the Paris Commune strips bronze, lead and precious metals from the building to be melted down, but the great bells escape.
• 19 January 1969: protesters fix a North Vietnamese flag to the top of the spire and sabotage the stairway; a Paris fire brigade sergeant, Raymond Belle, cuts it down during a helicopter mission, the first of its kind in France.
• 26 June 1971: the high-wire artist Philippe Petit walks a tightrope strung between the two west towers, almost 70 m above the square.
• 2013: four nineteenth-century bells in the north tower are melted down and recast to recreate the sound of the cathedral's seventeenth-century bells for its 850th anniversary.
• 15 April 2019: the spire collapses in the fire, and firefighters save the towers from the inside.

The towers at human scale

At 69 m, each tower is about 39 times the height of a 175 cm (5′9″) adult. The tour's 424 steps work out at an average of roughly 16 cm of height gained per step if the route climbed the full height, close to the rise of an ordinary household staircase, though the real route includes landings and level passages. For comparison with the people of Paris itself, the average height in France page gives the latest national figures for men and women.

Climbing the towers

The towers are managed separately from the cathedral by France's Centre des monuments nationaux. The current tour follows a route of 424 steps and must be booked online; admission is €16, with free entry for European Union residents under 26. Older guidebooks often quote 387 steps for the climb up the south tower, a figure that reflects the earlier route. The climb passes the bells and reaches the gallery between the towers, where the chimeras added by Viollet-le-Duc look out over the city, before continuing to the top.

From up there, the scale of the cathedral becomes clear: the rebuilt spire rises 27 m above you, while the Seine and the Île de la Cité spread below. Entry to the cathedral itself is free. For converting any of the heights in this article, the height converter turns meters into feet and inches.

Why 69 meters is enough

By modern standards, a 69 m tower is modest, less than a quarter of the height of the Eiffel Tower. But these towers were raised in the thirteenth century with human and animal muscle, timber scaffolding and simple lifting gear, and they stood over a city whose houses rarely rose more than a few stories. Their flat tops make the cathedral seem broader and more solid than spired churches of similar height, and they have survived revolution, neglect, war and fire. When the spire fell in 2019, it was the towers that held, and they remain the measure of Notre-Dame's height today.