Paris Events Calendar 2026: Top Festivals and Seasonal Highlights

Paris · Updated 25 July 2026

Most event calendars are a list of things you could go to. This one is the list a friend who lives here would give you: what's on, yes, but also which weekends fill the hotels, which days close the streets, and which ones are better watched than joined.

Pierre put most of it together. He guides through these weeks, so the notes on crowds and closures are the parts he'd tell you over a coffee before you set your dates.

The year at a glance

The full 2026 calendar, in order. The rows that change how you move around the city — road closures, packed hotels, a public holiday — are shaded.

Spring: March to May

Spring is when the city warms up and fills up. The weather turns, the terraces move back outside, and three of the year's busiest weekends land in a row. Book beds early if your trip touches any of them.

Fashion Week, womenswear — 2 to 10 March

The shows themselves are invitation-only, so what a visitor sees is the spillover: full hotels in the 1st and 8th, restaurants booked out around the Tuileries, and a certain density of black outfits and camera crews across the centre. If you're not here for it, it mainly means booking dinner ahead.

Paris Marathon — Sunday 12 April

Around fifty thousand runners set off from the Champs-Élysées and thread past the Louvre, Bastille, Notre-Dame and the Eiffel Tower before finishing near the Arc de Triomphe. For everyone else it's a morning of closed streets and restricted bridges across the centre and the two Bois. If you're moving that Sunday morning, walk or take the metro — anything on wheels above ground will be slow.

Source: Schneider Electric Marathon de Paris

Nuit Européenne des Musées — Saturday 23 May

Museums across the city stay open late into the night, most of them free, many with one-off performances and installations. It's one of the better evenings of the year for wandering between collections without a queue or a ticket. Pick three or four near each other rather than trying to cross the city.

Roland-Garros — 24 May to 7 June

The clay-court Grand Slam, out west at the Porte d'Auteuil. Day and night sessions run for two weeks, and the western edge of the 16th gets busy on the big match days. Tickets go on sale months ahead through the official site.

Summer: June to August

Summer is the open-air stretch — free concerts, festivals in the woods, and evenings long enough to stay out for. It also holds the single biggest day on the calendar.

We Love Green — 5 to 7 June

A weekend music festival on multiple stages in the Bois de Vincennes, as much about its food and its environmental bent as its line-up. It draws a young, local crowd and makes an easy day out east from the centre.

Nuit Blanche — Saturday 6 June

An all-night contemporary-art event: installations, projections and performances across the city, most of them free and built for walking between. It ran in October for twenty years and moved to June in 2023 for the warmer nights — so if an old guide tells you October, it's out of date. The 25th edition is directed by Barbara Butch, on the theme of love. We wrote up the locations, the hours and how to plan the night in our full Nuit Blanche 2026 guide.

Source: Nuit Blanche, Ville de Paris

Fête de la Musique — Sunday 21 June

The best single night of the Paris summer, and it costs nothing. On the solstice the whole city plays: bands on street corners, DJs in café doorways, brass in the squares, someone with an amp on a balcony. There's no programme to follow and that's the point — you walk, you hear something, you stop. Invented in France in 1982 and now copied worldwide, but Paris still does it best.

Source: Fête de la Musique, Ministère de la Culture

Bastille Day — Tuesday 14 July

The national holiday, and the fullest day of the year in the centre. A military parade comes down the Champs-Élysées in the morning; the fireworks over the Eiffel Tower draw enormous crowds to the Champ de Mars in the evening. Much of the 7th and 8th closes to traffic, the metro runs heavy, and it's a walking-and-watching day rather than a getting-things-done one. Museums and shops mostly keep holiday hours.

Rock en Seine — 26 to 30 August

One of the region's biggest rock and pop festivals, in the grounds of the Domaine national de Saint-Cloud, just west of the city. It's a train-and-shuttle trip out and a late one back, so plan the return before you go rather than after the headliner.

Jazz à la Villette — 28 August to 6 September

Jazz threaded through with soul, funk and things that don't sit neatly in any of those, across the venues around the Parc de la Villette in the northeast. It bridges the end of summer and the start of the cultural year, and tickets are modest by festival standards.

Autumn: September to November

September is la rentrée — Paris comes back from its holidays and the cultural year starts. The weather holds, the August queues thin out, and the city fills with people who actually live in it. For many visitors it's the best month of the year to come.

The third Saturday: two big things on one day

Saturday 19 September carries two large free events at once, and they're worth planning as a pair. The Journées du Patrimoine (19–20 September) open buildings that spend the rest of the year closed — the Élysée Palace, the National Assembly, ministries, embassies — free, though the famous addresses need a booking that goes within hours of opening in early September. The same afternoon, the Techno Parade returns after two years away, rolling through eastern Paris from Bastille to Nation. So half the city is queuing outside ministries in the 7th while the other half follows sound systems down Boulevard Voltaire.

We wrote the day up in full — what opens when, how the Élysée booking works, which streets close, and how to do both without wasting the afternoon on the metro.

Sources: Journées du patrimoine · @technoparade_paris

Fashion Week, womenswear — 28 September to 6 October

The bigger of the year's two womenswear weeks, and one of the tightest stretches for hotels and central restaurants. If your trip lands here and you're not part of it, book beds and dinner well ahead.

Paris Photo — 12 to 15 November

The leading international photography fair, with galleries, publishers and exhibitions gathered under one roof and shows spilling across the city's museums. A strong reason to come in a month that doesn't usually get one, and a fitting one in 2026 — the bicentenary of photography, which the September Heritage Days take as their theme too.

Starting your trip with a ride

Whatever brings you here, the first morning is the one to spend getting your bearings. A few hours on a bike covers far more than walking, keeps you off the crowded metro, and leaves you with a guide's own list for the rest of the trip — where to eat, which corners are worth your evening, how to reach the festival you came for.

Pierre and the team ride through all of these weeks, and on the busy days they set the route on the morning itself, once the closures are actually up. That's the difference between a good ride and a long wait at a barrier.

FAQ: visiting Paris around its events

Planning around a specific date, or not sure which weekend to pick? Write to us through the contact page, in whichever language you prefer — we will reply in the same one.