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Subway: with its 256 steps, this escalator is the longest in Paris

undefined undefined 9 décembre 2025 undefined 07h30

The Editor

© Métroën / Wikimedia Commons

At Au Bonbon, we are bursting with little juicy anecdotes about the City of Light, and we just love sharing them with you. Today, we’ve decided to focus on a bit of a niche topic, we admit: the escalators in the Paris metro. And more specifically, one of them that holds a very special record: it’s the longest in the capital.

If you've become, like us, an expert in the art of finding your way through the maze that the metro corridors sometimes represent, you've surely noticed that they are not always the most fun place in the world. And for good reason, making a connection or exiting a station can sometimes feel like running a marathon on escalators or scaling heights worthy of Everest. For instance, there's this station in the 19th that has the largest escalator in Paris.


Always More

When you take an interest in the history of the metro and its quirky stories, some numbers might surprise you.

They really stand out! 24.3 — the number of kilometers of Line 8, currently the longest line in Paris — 52 — like the depth in meters of the Saint-Maur - Créteil station, the lowest in the network — 4,000 — the number of signage panels in the stations and on board the trains — or even 50,793,790 — that’s the number of travelers passing through the Gare du Nord every day. Well, today we're adding a little more to the list with 256, the number of steps in the escalator at the… Place des Fêtes station!


A station at the top

Yes indeed, despite what some clever clogs might think, we’re not going to talk again about the Abbesses station, the deepest one in the capital (within the city limits). It’s actually at Place des Fêtes that you’ll find this technological marvel. While the platform is not as deep, only 27 meters underground, compared to 36 for Abbesses — the latter doesn’t have any escalator due to the steep drop. A similar issue initially arose at Place des Fêtes, which thus got elevators, before they were replaced by the famous stairs, leading to two entrances made of reinforced concrete that served as anti-bomb shelters.

Bombing during the Second World War. And voilà, two stories for the price of one, no need to thank us!