Eiffel Tower Webcam

Is the Eiffel Tower sparkling right now? If it is dark in Paris and the clock has just passed the hour, the answer is almost certainly yes, and the Eiffel Tower live cam shows it as it happens. The camera is mounted on the roof of the Palais d’Iéna, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, France, roughly 700 meters north of the tower, and it looks south across the Seine at the 1,083-foot iron tower with a wide strip of Paris sky above it. It is one of the live webcams in Paris on our site, and the stream runs 24/7.

During the day, the Eiffel Tower webcam works as a weather and sky view, like many of the live webcams from around the world we list: you can see at a glance whether the summit is lost in low cloud, whether rain is moving in over the Left Bank, or whether the light is clear enough for photos from the top. After dark the feed changes completely, because the tower, finished on March 31, 1889, for the Exposition Universelle, is lit in three different ways, and all three show up on the live stream.

What time does the Eiffel Tower sparkle on the live cam?

The sparkle runs for five minutes at the start of every hour once night has fallen, and the last show is at midnight or 1 a.m., depending on the season, according to the Eiffel Tower’s official lighting schedule. The first one depends on sunset. Light sensors switch on the golden lighting automatically within about 10 minutes of dusk, and the sparkle waits for the next full hour: if it gets dark at 7:40 p.m., the first show is at 8 p.m.

On the live camera you can pick out each layer. The steady orange glow comes from 336 high-pressure sodium lamps installed in 1985, a system designed by lighting engineer Pierre Bideau. The sparkle is made by 20,000 six-watt bulbs on all four faces that flash at random. At the very top, the beacon turns all night: four marine-style projectors rotate to throw a beam that can be seen up to 80 kilometers (50 miles) away on a clear evening. Both the sparkle and the beacon were switched on for the first time on January 1, 2000, for the millennium, and the sparkle became permanent in June 2003.

The final show of the night is the one most people miss. At the last sparkle, the golden lights and the beacon go dark, and for five minutes only the white bulbs flicker on a black tower. If you are watching from the United States, remember that Paris is usually six hours ahead of New York, so a 9 p.m. sparkle in Paris happens at 3 p.m. Eastern. The official lighting history also lists special colors for certain causes and dates, such as the pink illuminations for Octobre Rose, France’s breast cancer awareness month.

Where is the Eiffel Tower webcam, and what does it see?

The Palais d’Iéna is a reinforced concrete building designed by Auguste Perret, built from 1937 as a museum of public works and today the seat of France’s Economic, Social and Environmental Council. From its roof on Place d’Iéna, the view runs south over the Seine to the Left Bank, where the tower stands at the northwest end of the Champ de Mars in the 7th arrondissement, right beside the Pont d’Iéna. That whole riverside, including the tower and the nearby Palais de Chaillot at Trocadéro, belongs to the UNESCO World Heritage site Paris, Banks of the Seine, inscribed in 1991.

Because the camera faces south, the sun sits behind the tower in the middle of the day, so the iron lattice often appears as a dark silhouette around noon. Morning and late afternoon light hits it from the side and brings out the detail of the lattice, and sunset color builds toward the west, on the right side of the frame. For a view of Paris from the opposite side of the city, the Sacré-Cœur live cam watches the basilica on top of Montmartre, on the Right Bank.

Is the Eiffel Tower open today, or is something wrong?

“Is the Eiffel Tower on fire?” shows up in Google’s own search suggestions, often after a rumor or a recycled video circulates. The live view is the quickest way to check whether there is smoke or anything unusual on the structure. Real incidents do happen: on December 24, 2024, about 1,200 visitors were evacuated after an elevator cable overheated in the shaft between the first and second floors, and the fire stayed contained inside that shaft.

The camera cannot tell you whether the ticket gates are open, so check the official site before going. Opening hours are currently 9:30 a.m. to 11 p.m., with the last ascent at 10:45 p.m., and access to the summit can be restricted in bad weather or at peak times. This is where the Eiffel Tower live stream helps: if the top of the tower is buried in cloud, the third floor at 906 feet will not have much of a view. About 7 million people visit every year, which makes it the most visited paid monument in the world. The tower is also one of the landmarks on our monument webcams page, alongside the Statue of Liberty and Christ the Redeemer.

If you are planning a visit, the closest stops are Bir-Hakeim on metro line 6, Trocadéro on lines 6 and 9, and Champ de Mars Tour Eiffel on RER C. From Trocadéro, the walk down through the gardens and across the Pont d’Iéna puts you under the tower’s north pillar in about 10 minutes.

The best moment to open the Eiffel Tower live cam is the last half hour of daylight. You see the sky change behind the tower, the golden lights come on by themselves, and then, on the hour, the first sparkle of the night. When it ends, the Notre-Dame live cam on the Seine is a good next stop, about four kilometers upriver.