Notre-Dame de Paris reopened to the public in December 2025, five years and eight months after fire ravaged its roof and toppled the nineteenth-century spire onto the vaulted ceiling below. The restoration anchored 850 cubic meters of replacement oak, recast the original Viollet-le-Duc spire to its 1859 profile, and reinstated the acoustic balance across the nave that had defined Parisian liturgical music since the Middle Ages. Entry remains free under French heritage law, but online reservation now gates access to the cathedral floor; walk-up visitors face waits that stretch past two hours during the mid-morning peak. The Gothic structure Maurice de Sully commissioned in 1163 took 182 years to complete. Its western façade carries three portals — the Portal of the Virgin to the north, the Portal of the Last Judgment at center, the Portal of Saint Anne to the south — each carved with concentric archivolts that map salvation history in limestone. Twenty-eight statues representing the kings of Judah line the Gallery of Kings above; Revolutionary forces mistook them for French monarchs and beheaded the figures in 1793. The recovered heads reside in the Musée de Cluny; the façade carries twentieth-century replacements. Notre dame private tours paris grant reserved cathedral entry and licensed commentary that decodes the iconographic program threading through the sculptural tympana, the rose windows, and the interior chapels dedicated to guilds that funded the cathedral's construction. The fire of April 15, 2019 consumed the roof structure — known as *la forêt* for the density of its medieval oak beams — and melted the lead cladding into droplets that fused with stone across the transept. The three rose windows survived; the organ's 8,000 pipes were dismantled, cleaned of lead dust, and reassembled. Restoration workshops documented every timber joint before felling replacement oaks from forests across France, hand-shaping each beam with the broadaxe and chisel techniques that built the original frame. Private guided tours of the cathedral trace the fire's path and the forensic methods that stabilized the vaults, then turn to the ambulatory where radiating chapels hold relics including the Crown of Thorns, displayed the first Friday of each month and every Friday during Lent. Tour groups limited to twelve visitors move through the transepts without competing for sightlines; guides trained in Gothic architecture and Marian iconography allocate thirty minutes inside the nave and fifteen along the parvis, where foundation markers expose the Gallo-Roman settlement beneath Île de la Cité.