How many visitors has the Eiffel Tower received since its opening?

The Eiffel Tower has received over 300 million visitors since its opening.

The monument reached the 300-million-visitor milestone in September 2017, according to the tower’s operator. Because millions of people visit each year, the cumulative total has continued to rise since then. “Over 300 million” is therefore the appropriate broad answer rather than a precise, permanently fixed count.

The tower opened to visitors during the 1889 Exposition Universelle, soon becoming one of Paris’s defining attractions. In its first year, roughly two million people visited, an extraordinary figure for a structure that many critics had expected to be temporary. Today, annual attendance is commonly around six million, although it varies with closures, renovations, strikes and global travel conditions.

A frequent mix-up is confusing visitors to the Eiffel Tower with visitors to Paris or with people who have viewed the monument from outside. The milestone refers to people welcomed to the tower site over its history. Its continuing popularity is especially notable because the structure was originally authorized as a temporary installation and was nearly dismantled after the exposition.