Love it or hate it, the Paris subway system is a huge part of life in the City of Light.
It opened in 1900, has over 300 stations, and carries over 4 million people each day. But they’re the boring facts. Let’s go a little deeper.
The Paris metro in numbers
1. The average distance between stations is 548 metres (600 yards).
2. If you’re above ground, you’re never further than 400 metres (440 yards) from a station.
3. A metro trip between two consecutive stations takes, on average, 58 seconds.
4. Abbesses is the deepest station at 36 metres (40 yards) underground.
Unusual Metro station designs
5. The Concorde station is covered in tiles that spell out the Declaration of the Rights of Man from the French Revolution.
6. While Arts-et-Metiers looks like a submarine.
7. Bastille has historic scenes marking the start of the French revolution and remnants of the Bastille prison on one of the platforms
8. Louvre has replica relics from some of the museum’s famous pieces.
The ghost stations
9. Nowadays there are at least two “ghost stations” that are no longer in use. One was called Porte Molitor and the other was Haxo.
10. The station of Porte de Lilas has an unused platform that is often used as a backdrop for French music videos and films (but for some Hollywood ones too, including Julia and Julia with Meryl Streep).
11. Another ghost station, Saint-Martin, was closed because it’s just 100 metres from the next stop (Strasbourg Saint-Denis). The station is frozen in 1939, when it was closed to the public. You can still see the adverts on the wall from the time.
The iconic Paris metro entrances
12. Abbesses is one of two stations with the original glass-covered entrances by architect Hector Guimard (see it above). The other is at Porte Dauphine, which is actually in its original position. (the one at Abbesses, however, was moved from the Marais).
13. The iconic art nouveau Metro entrances have been imitated abroad, including in Chicago, Moscow, Montreal, Mexico City, and Lisbon. Read more about the famed entrances here.
All aboard, more fun facts
14. Châtelet – Les Halles in central Paris is the world’s largest Metro station, and it serves five separate lines (1, 4, 7, 11, 14). You will get lost there your first time. And probably the second time too.
15. The Metro went underwater in the Great Flood of 1910, making for some exceptional photographs (like at Montparnasse station below).
16. Metro stations sometimes change names, especially during times of war. For example: Jaures was once Allemagne (the French word for Germany), Liege was once called Berlin. Both were renamed after the outbreak of war in 1914.
17. In 2015, a British man redesigned the map to resemble a bike wheel. It never caught on, even though it’s wheely good.
18. And lastly, the Metro system seems to be ever-expanding. If you’re interested in the future of the Metro, the Cité de l’Architecture museum is running an exhibition on the expansion of the Metro, which runs until June 2024.
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