Notre-Dame cathedral's grand return: What you need to know about Paris icon reopening

The iconic Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris is getting ready for its big come-back (after being closed for repairs since that terrible fire back in 2019) The medieval church - a true master-piece of Gothic design built in mid-12th century has been through a major clean-up and fix-up job

The re-opening plans are set: Emmanuel Macron will give his speech on dec 7th evening‚ then Archbishop Laurent Ulrich will do this cool old-school thing - knock on the big doors with his special staff; theres gonna be some singing from inside and then everyone gets to see how nice it looks now

The money part was no problem: super-rich French business-people (like Pinault and the Arnault family) helped raise more than 840-mil euros. All that cash went into fixing the roof spire and other stuff that got burned - plus they cleaned up all the old dirty stones and fixed-up the furniture

• Regular folks can visit from dec 8th evening
• Online booking starts early-december
• Church groups allowed from feb 1st
• Tourist guides start from june 9th

The whole place got a real good scrub-down: its gonna look way better than before - even the parts that didnt burn got cleaned up real nice. Fun fact: when the fire happened some quick-thinking workers made a human-chain to save all the fancy gold stuff and special items (which is pretty cool if you ask me)

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame made this place world-famous‚ but its always been special to Paris - with its cool gargoyles stained-glass windows and fancy stone-work

No one knows exactly what started the fire - maybe it was bad wiring or somebodyʼs cigarette but that dont matter now because the cathedralʼs coming back better than ever. Theyʼre thinking about 15-mil visitors might show up each year; right now its free to get in but theres a big argument going on about charging people later