The cathedral is more than seven hundred years old. It was built in three stages and completed in 1250, after around 170 years of construction. This was when the early gothic architecture was at its height and it was felt that Paris should contain an impressive cathedral featuring innovations to emphasise its importance in relation to smaller towns.
It is situated at the heart of the city - and of the country - and its famous entrance and highly decorative portals make it one of Paris's most iconic buildings.
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I have actually spent more than 5 minutes on this page... looking frantically for a link that would take me to the next section of the - I hesitate to call it an 'article'.
Very disappointing.
Hello Ewa
Thank you for contacting OpenLearn, and I'm sorry to hear of your disappointment.
This page forms part of a set of pages about Paris:
http://www.open.edu/openlearn/languages/french/explore-paris
These pages used to be in a self-contained, but not very 'accessible' interactive in a previous version of OpenLearn. They have been separated out to make them more accessible to those who use speech readers etc, but I can understand that if you arrived here via a search engine, you'd be a bit confused.
I hope this helps,
best wishes,
OpenLearn Moderator
Don't understand the point of these "5 minute" pages.. so short as to be useless