Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris was already 700 years old when Victor Hugo wrote the novel that saved it. By the 1830s, this Gothic masterpiece had fallen into such disrepair that demolition seemed inevitable. Then came The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, and suddenly all of France wanted to preserve what Hugo had so vividly celebrated.

The restoration that followed gave us the gargoyles and spire we knew until April 2019, when fire consumed the medieval roof and sent that famous spire crashing through the limestone vaults below.

Construction began in 1163 and took nearly a century to complete. The flying buttresses, stretching up to 15 metres, allowed for thinner walls and those enormous rose windows, including one nearly 10 metres wide that still contains much of its original 13th-century glass.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours trace the cathedral's remarkable cycles of ruin and rebirth, from Hugo's literary rescue to the 2019 fire and its painstaking restoration, while uncovering how Notre-Dame witnessed WWII resistance fighting on its parvis and narrowly escaped Hitler's orders to destroy Paris.