While daydreaming about Paris (as I do), I started to think about its most famous icon—the Eiffel Tower—which also happens to be the most-visited paid tourist attraction in the entire world. About six million people visit it every year. Many making the trip in the summer months.
There are so many fascinating facts about this French structure. And I like to think I’m familiar with a lot of them. But what I somehow didn’t know until just now?
The Eiffel Tower is repainted every seven years or so—by hand. That’s right. A team of 25 painters—with approximately 60,000 tonnes of paint and 1,500 paintbrushes in hand—take to the Tower to strip it, clean it, and apply several coats of paint. They do all of this work over the course of about 18 months without ever closing the towering tourist attraction to the public.
Pretty impressive, right? I think so.
And also important. The paint is what protects the Tower—constructed out of wrought iron—from oxidation.
You can learn all about the painting process in detail on the Eiffel Tower’s site.