Sainte Chapelle’s Stained Glass, Paris

To say Paris is a romantic city is really not just a cliche: I could take holidays there every year (if only a fairy godmother would pay!). And while everybody gets to famous spots like the Eiffel Tower there are hundreds of other beautiful monuments and buildings to see. One I stumbled across a little by accident is the Gothic church Sainte Chapelle on the Île de la Cité in the Seine River.

Sainte Chapelle is not an unknown tourist destination, quite the contrary - I found it because it was included as somewhere I could enter for free using my Paris tourist card. But it's certainly not as well known as the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre or the Arc de Triomphe.

From the outside, Sainte Chapelle seemed to me like a small, fairly run-of-the-mill church. It was built in the 1200s and was initially a chapel for the royal palace, led at the time by Louis IX. Most of the royal palace which used to surround it no longer exists, but Sainte Chapelle is still standing.

Once you get inside, you'll instantly understand what I'm making such a fuss about. The tall stained glass windows of Sainte Chapelle are still the most beautiful I have seen in any church or building across the world. The stained glass seems to nearly cover every wall and the colors are vibrant and vivid. If you're lucky enough to visit during a sunny day as I did, the effects as sunlight comes through the stained glass windows is magical.

Over the centuries, Sainte Chapelle had an interesting history, and the luckiest part is that during the French revolution, it was used not as a chapel but as an administrative office, and large parts of the stained glass windows were covered by very large filling cabinets. This in fact saved the stained glass from vandalism which destroyed other parts of the chapel.

My recommendation is to take a time out in Sainte Chapelle when you're feeling that Paris is just a little too big and a little too full of tourists. Schedule an unhurried visit where you can sit and watch people. If you stare up at the stained glass windows for long enough, you'll feel like you're alone in some kind of colorful paradise, and for me it was a refreshing break from the Paris streets. Take some photos on slow exposures and play around with the colors until you feel ready to be a tourist again.