Begin your exciting Top Tier Eiffel Tower Tour at the base, where your expert English-speaking guide will escort your small semi-private group of no more than 6 people past the long lines, and straight to the glass elevator that will take you on a giddy ascent to the very top of the Eiffel Tower. Standing in the elevator as it takes you up, up, up to nearly 300 meters in the air, with all of Paris spread out beneath you, is a truly exhilarating experience!
As the most iconic monument of Paris, the Eiffel Tower has become a global symbol of the City of Lights. Built in just two years for the World’s Fair of 1889 – which Paris hosted on the centenary of the French Revolution – it was only meant to stand for 20 years. Today, we cannot imagine Paris without the Iron Lady! On your semi-private tour, your guide will regale you with the fascinating story of the Eiffel Tower – and the man who gave his name to it, Gustav Eiffel. You’ll hear about the competition for a monument to welcome the world to Paris, the amazing engineering ingenuity of its architects, and the many controversies that accompanied it. Many writers and artists of the day believed it to be an eye-sore, and the novelist Guy de Maupassant had lunch on the Eiffel every day for a year in protest, claiming it was the only place he could get a decent view of the city!
Today the Tower is loved and recognized globally: it plays host to countless proposals of marriage, and the whole city enjoys the magic of its nightly light show.
An extraordinary feat of engineering, the Eiffel Tower weighs a colossal 10,100 tons, and was made with 18,038 pieces of iron – which are held together in that famous lattice structure with 2.5 million rivets.
This tour enables you to explore the Tower from the bottom to the very top, with reserved summit access: it is a daring adventure as much as a guided tour! At the top, you’ll see the fantastic exhibitions on display including Gustav Eiffel’s office with wax works of him, his daughter, and the American inventor Thomas Edison. Be sure to toast your daring ascent in the champagne bar too! You can stay on the Eiffel Tower at your leisure or return to ground level with your guide.