Bungee jumping is one of the greatest thrills you can get in the modern world.
What feels like a sheer, unsupported free fall into oblivion—the rush is enough to change your life!
But a simple jump not being enough, some people want to jump from the biggest landmarks—so could you jump from the Eiffel Tower?
No, you unfortunately cannot bungee jump from the Eiffel Tower. It has been done illegally on a couple of occasions, but there is no legal pathway to doing it. It isn’t allowed, and given the shape of the tower, wouldn’t really be safe anyway.
As loathe as I am to be the bearer of bad news, bungee jumping off the Eiffel Tower just isn’t something that’s allowed.
The Tower is meant as a tourist attraction for people to climb up and get good pictures of Paris—not as an extreme sports attraction.
Let’s find out more.
Is bungee jumping allowed from the Eiffel Tower?
No, it is not.
There’s not much more to it than that.
Bungee jumping from the tower is not allowed, it is not offered by any special company, and if you tried to do it, you’d find yourself in serious trouble with Parisian authorities.
Indeed, in more recent years, taller and taller barriers have been erected on the tower in order to prevent suicides.
So, it would be practically impossible in any case.
The tower is meant as a much gentler affair, for tourists to calmly climb to the top, and calmly climb back down to the bottom.
It provides fantastic views around Paris, and that’s all the thrill most people are looking for from the tower.
It’s certainly all the authorities and tourist agencies want you to do!
There have been jumps from the tower, as I’ll get into, but they are highly illegal and come with very serious penalties for all involved.
Even if you could get all the equipment up there unseen after hours, you’re going to get caught in the act.
There’s no avoiding that.
So, bungee jumping from the tower itself is strictly off-limits.
There’s no chance of you doing that if you want to avoid getting arrested.
But can you jump anywhere in Paris?
Can you bungee jump in Paris?
There are definitely opportunities to bungee jump around Paris.
Your closes option is the viaduct at Saint Georges de Gaultier, which is over the river Vaudelle.
Here you can jump into an impressive natural gorge, though you admittedly don’t get great views of the city.
There really aren’t any schools for jumping within Paris itself.
You’ll have to go out of the city for that.
After all, bungee jumping schools need a good deal of space to operate, so you won’t find many within cities.
Again, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there’s just not much path to jumping near the Eiffel Tower.
But that doesn’t mean bungee jumping in France isn’t available and is loads of fun.
There are plenty of places of tremendous natural beauty to jump from, which will make for a great day out.
So, as I said, while jumping from the Eiffel Tower is not legal, we all know that that doesn’t always stop people from doing it—so who has jumped from the Eiffel Tower?
Who bungee jumped off the Eiffel Tower?
For some context, bungee jumping is really a relatively recent phenomenon.
Until around 1987, it wasn’t much known outside of New Zealand.
The world had yet to be introduced to this brand-new extreme sport.
It would begin spreading to the rest of the world in the following decades, but as of yet it was relatively unknown.
In 1986, a man named A.J. Hackett travelled to Paris, nominally as part of the skiing team for New Zealand.
He jumped from a few points, like a cable car at the ski resort and a high peak.
But a year later, in 1987, he made an illegal jump from the Eiffel Tower.
This brought national attention to the event and the sport in general, and he ended up spending a short spell in prison for the offence.
To date, he is the only known person to have jumped from the Eiffel Tower.
He was the first and the last.
How tall is the Eiffel Tower?
In all this, you might be wondering how tall the jump actually would be.
The very tip of the Eiffel Tower is 330 meters from the ground.
Compare this with the Burj Khalifa, the tallest man-made building, at 828 meters.
The Eiffel Tower is impressively tall!
The height that you can reach by walking up the tower is only 300 meters, though, so it is a bit smaller than that.
In any case, that would certainly be a big and thrilling jump.
It is a shame that jumping from it is not possible, but it just wouldn’t be practical by any means.
Just like mountain climbers saying they had to climb Everest simply because it was there, it’s natural for bungee jump enthusiasts to look at a tall structure and ask why we cannot jump from it.
But there’s no arguing with the law, and the law will not allow a bungee jump from the Eiffel Tower.
There are still many places in and around Paris that you can jump from, potentially even with a view of the tower.
But your jumps must stay away.
