Notre-Dame Cathedral

She burned on live television on April 15, 2019, and roughly a billion people watched, many of them weeping for a building they'd never set foot in. That tells you something about Notre-Dame — she belongs to everyone, whether you're Catholic, atheist, or just someone who once read The Hunchback and felt something.

Construction started in 1163 under Bishop Maurice de Sully, and it took nearly two centuries to finish. The flying buttresses that make her so recognizable weren't in the original plan — they were an emergency retrofit when the walls started pushing outward under the weight of the roof. Happy accident: they became one of the defining features of Gothic architecture worldwide. The three rose windows, each nearly 10 meters across, contain some of the oldest stained glass in Paris, and during World War II, Parisians removed them piece by piece and hid them to keep them safe from bombing.

Napoleon crowned himself Emperor here in 1804, snatching the crown from the Pope's hands and placing it on his own head. During the Revolution, the cathedral was ransacked and renamed the "Temple of Reason" — the statues of the Kings of Judah on the facade were beheaded because the mob thought they were French kings. The original heads were found in 1977, buried in a Parisian basement during a bank renovation.

The restoration after the 2019 fire has been extraordinary. The medieval oak forest that formed the roof — nicknamed "the Forest" because each beam came from a different tree, some over 800 years old — has been rebuilt using traditional techniques. The cathedral reopened in December 2024, and the new golden rooster atop the spire contains relics salvaged from the fire, including a piece of the Crown of Thorns.