This is part of Reason's 2025 summer travel issue. Click here to read the rest of the issue.
Fire nearly destroyed the Notre-Dame Cathedral in 2019. Thanks largely to an outpouring of private donations, the cathedral now shines more brilliantly than it has for centuries.
My personal history with the cathedral stretches back to my first Europe on $10 a Day backpacking and youth hosteling visit in the late 1970s. Advising me to eschew faux sophistication, my boss at The New Yorker urged me to visit popular sites like Notre-Dame because "they are tourist attractions for good reasons." He was entirely correct. It was everything a youngish first-time traveler to Europe expected of an ancient gothic cathedral: gray, a bit dingy, yet magnificent.
