What are the best day trips during the French Open — Versailles, Auteuil, or Montmartre?

Versailles for a full day out, or two very different Paris neighborhoods for a shorter one

With the tournament running two full weeks, there's real room to build a genuine non-match day into a longer trip — either a full outward day trip to Versailles, or a shorter, no-travel-time break in one of two very different Paris neighborhoods.

Versailles — a real day out

RER C runs directly from central Paris to Versailles in 35-45 minutes, no change required. This is the genuine day-trip-outside-the-city option, since Roland-Garros sits inside Paris itself, unlike most events with a nearby-city day-trip anchor.

Versailles — Day Trip Outside Paris

★4.6(170,677 Google reviews)

A palace built to overwhelm, and the private village its own monarchy built to escape it

Roland-Garros gives you Paris at its most contained and civic — a tournament inside the city, a short Métro ride from wherever you're staying. Versailles is the opposite register entirely: French royal power at its most unrestrained, a palace and garden complex built specifically to overwhelm anyone who walked through it. Seeing both on the same trip is seeing two genuinely different versions of what this country has been at its most confident.

Versailles, Île-de-France

Worth knowing

• —Book timed-entry tickets online well ahead, especially for a May-June visit — Versailles genuinely sells out during peak season, and arriving without a pre-booked slot risks a wait of over an hour or being turned away entirely.
• —The Passport ticket (€32 on Musical Fountains days, €27 without) covers the Trianon Estate and Hamlet that the cheaper Palace-only ticket (€21) doesn't — if a full day is planned, the Passport's marginal cost is worth it for access to what many visitors consider the estate's best part.

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Or a shorter break inside Paris

Village d'Auteuil sits a short walk from the venue itself — a genuine former village with hidden Art Nouveau architecture most Roland-Garros visitors never see. Montmartre is the opposite register entirely, a genuine cross-city trip to the hilltop neighborhood where modern art actually happened.

Village d'Auteuil

A former separate village hiding Art Nouveau villas behind gates most visitors miss

Most Roland-Garros visitors treat the 16th arrondissement purely as "the area near the stadium" and never register it contains an actual former village with its own architectural identity. That's the gap this entry fills — a genuinely under-visited pocket of Paris that happens to sit close enough to the stadium to combine with a match day rather than requiring a separate trip.

Auteuil, 16th arrondissement

Worth knowing

• —The Rue d'Auteuil market runs Wednesday and Saturday mornings only — plan a non-match morning around it if visiting on the right day, since it's a genuine, long-running local market rather than a daily tourist draw.
• —The private villas (Villa Montmorency, Villa Dietz-Monnin, Villa Molitor) are residential cul-de-sacs behind gates — walk past respectfully during daytime hours rather than treating them as an open tourist attraction; residents live there year-round.

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Montmartre — Paris's Hilltop Artists' Village

The hilltop village where modern art actually happened — Sacré-Cœur, artists, and a view over the whole city

The 16th arrondissement, where Roland-Garros sits, is elegant, quiet, residential — genuinely lovely, but not where Paris's creative history actually happened. Montmartre is. Pairing a morning at the tournament with an afternoon on this hill gives a Roland-Garros trip two entirely different registers of Paris in the same day: the tournament's institutional grandeur, then a neighborhood built by painters who mostly couldn't afford institutional anything.

Montmartre, 18th arrondissement

Worth knowing

• —Climb the Sacré-Cœur's dome (292 steps, separate ticket from the free basilica entry) for a higher, less crowded view than the popular front steps — most visitors never go past the steps, so the dome view is a genuinely quieter payoff for the same hill.
• —Visit Place du Tertre's working artists earlier in the day if you actually want a portrait done without a long wait — the square gets progressively busier through the afternoon as tour groups arrive.

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Sources: en.chateauversailles.fr, RATP.