How many times a night does the Eiffel Tower sparkle?

Four to seven. That is the count for the Eiffel Tower, and the season picks the number. Five-minute shows. and top of the hour. First one shortly after sunset. Last one at 11 pm normally, 1 am from late June through early September when the monument runs its summer schedule.

December has long nights and the sunset in Paris lands near 5 pm. Five pm first, 11 pm last, seven shows total. July goes the other way. Sunset hangs on past 9:30 pm, the first sparkle slips to 10 pm, and even with the 1 am summer extension only four shows fit before closing. March, April, May, September, October, November sit between those two poles and drift week by week with the daylight.

Show length and gap do not move, five minutes per show and sixty minutes between. Only the night's first sparkle and last sparkle change with the calendar.

For the unobstructed open-air view, head to the Trocadero gardens or the Champ de Mars. Both fill up about ten minutes before the hour during peak weeks.

No. Sixty minutes, not thirty. Each sparkle hits the hour, runs five minutes, stops. The Tower goes back to its plain golden glow until the next hour ticks over.

Where does the thirty-minute idea come from? Confusion with two other lights that run alongside the sparkles, the golden lighting comes from 336 sodium spotlights that wash the iron from sunset to closing. The rotating beacon up top is four marine-style floodlights sweeping the Paris sky non-stop. Neither pauses. The sparkle is the third layer, and it shows up only at the hour mark for five minutes at a time.

Spend an evening at the Champ de Mars and the gold plus the beacon stay on the whole time. The white twinkling only kicks in when the clock hits the hour.

No. The Eiffel Tower does not sparkle every five minutes. Five minutes is the length of each show, not the gap between shows. The gap is always sixty minutes.

The confusion comes from the way "five minutes" dominates the description of the spectacle. The 20,000 six-watt bulbs flash randomly across the four sides of the Tower for five minutes, then shut off all at once. Sixty minutes later, the next show begins.

The five-minute figure has not always been the standard. When the sparkles were introduced for the new-year transition from 1999 to 2000, each show ran for ten minutes. In 2008, the operator cut the duration in half. The shorter run time lowered the annual electricity load on the sparkle system and extended the working life of the bulb installation by several years. Since 2008, the show length has stayed at five minutes per hour, every night.

Yes, every hour on the hour after dark, with a couple of footnotes.

The opening show waits for full darkness. Sunset at 8:35 pm gets a 9 pm first sparkle, not an 8:35 pm first sparkle. The roughly twenty-five minutes between the two are baked into the lighting program for visual contrast.

The final show shifts with the season. From October to mid-June the curtain falls at 11 pm. That 11 pm cap was set in September 2022 when Paris pulled back its public-monument lighting hours under an energy-saving plan. Late June through early September is the exception: the Tower itself stays open until 12:45 am, so the sparkles run two hours past the normal cutoff and finish at 1 am. The 1 am show is the odd one out. Golden lights and rotating beacon switch off first, leaving only the white twinkle against an unlit silhouette for five minutes.

Hourly. Five minutes per show. Last call at 11 pm or 1 am, season permitting. The sparkle was designed by lighting engineer Pierre Bideau and is the part most travelers think of as the show. The continuous gold and the rotating beacon run alongside it but are not what people mean by "the Eiffel Tower light show."