Rain doesn't have to cancel your day in Paris: the city has plenty of covered arcades, human-scale museums and architecturally spectacular spaces to fill a whole day without ever needing an umbrella. Here are three ideas made for a rainy day.
The covered passages
The 2nd arrondissement holds Paris's finest covered passages, glass-roofed 19th-century shopping arcades. Galerie Vivienne, opened in 1826 in a neoclassical "Pompeian" style, features a domed glass rotunda and a mosaic floor by Facchina. Right nearby, Passage des Panoramas, dating from 1799, is the oldest surviving covered passage in Paris. Of the roughly thirty passages that once existed in the 19th century, only about a dozen survive today, most of them clustered in this neighborhood.
The Musée de l'Orangerie
Tucked inside the Jardin des Tuileries, this human-scale museum houses the eight large Water Lilies compositions by Claude Monet, spread across two oval rooms designed with the artist and opened in 1927. Monet had planned natural overhead lighting so the canvases would shift tone with the daylight outside, a feature restored in 2006. Allow one to two hours for the visit, plus the Walter-Guillaume collection downstairs (Cézanne, Renoir, Modigliani, Picasso).
The Galeries Lafayette dome
Even with no shopping in mind, the flagship store on Boulevard Haussmann is worth a stop for its 1912 Art Nouveau dome, a forty-three-meter glass-and-steel structure adorned with stained glass by Jacques Grüber and ironwork by Louis Majorelle. Restored in 2021 after more than two years of work, it can be admired for free from the store's various floors, well out of the rain.
Tips
The covered passages in the 2nd arrondissement are within easy walking distance of one another, letting you string several glass-roofed arcades together without hardly touching a wet pavement. For the rest of your trip, the metro and RER cover the whole city with more than 300 stations, usually just a few minutes' walk from wherever you are.
