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Paris - A much-anticipated facelift of the Eiffel Tower will be unveiled on Monday with a new glass floor to dizzy the millions of tourists who flock to Paris's best-known landmark every year.
Its owners hope the formerly dowdy and draughty first floor will become as big an attraction as the viewing platform on top of the 325-metre tower - the most visited paying monument in the world.
Visitors will be able to look down through a solid glass floor to the 57 square metres below, with transparent and eco-friendly pavilions built around the tower's enormous central void.
To heighten the frisson of walking on air still further, the glass safety barriers around the edge have been inclined outwards.
Previously the first floor was the least visited part of the tower, but its operators hope tourists will now linger at the end of their visit behind sheltering floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook Paris.
The €30m (R426.21m) refit, which took two years, includes shops, restaurants and a museum where the history of the 125-year-old tower will be told on seven screens.
The city of Paris, which holds a majority stake in the monument, charged architects Moatti-Riviere with creating a space that would show off Gustave Eiffel's impressive original ironwork and make it fully accessible for disabled visitors.
The new buildings will also produce part of their own energy using windmills and solar panels, and the toilets will be run partly on rainwater.
"We wanted to set an example," said Jean-Bernard Bros, the president of SETE, the operator of the tower, which had a turnover of €73m (R1.04bn) in 2013.
Fun facts about the "Iron Lady":
- It attracts around seven million visitors a year, of which 85 are foreign tourists. Most visitors, however, come from France (12.5%) followed by Americans (8.5%), Britons (7.1%), Italians (6.7%) and Germans (5.7%).
- Open every day of the year, the distinctive structure has had more than 250 million visitors since it opened. Some 6 740 000 visitors made their way to the top in 2013 (up 7.5% on 2012). It employs 308 people.
- The renovation of the first floor may be now complete, but work on the enormous structure built for the World's Fair of 1889 never ends. The tower has to be repainted every seven years, a job that requires 60 tonnes of paint.
- Opened during the World's Fair in 1889- the centenary of the French Revolution - the 324-metre tower remained the world's tallest for 40 years, until it was overtaken by New York's Chrysler Building in 1929.
- It took two years, two months and five days to build. It was meant to be dismantled after only 20 years, but was saved because its creator, the engineer Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923), had pushed it as a major base for scientific innovation, particularly in early radio transmissions.
- There are 1 665 steps to the top of the tower. The first platform is at 57 metres, the second at 115 metres and the third at 276 metres.
- Authorities are planning to build an underground reception area to ease the wait for the long queues of people waiting to take the lift - or the stairs - to one of its upper floors.
- The tower has 18 000 iron parts, not including 2.5 million rivets, weighing a total of 10 100 tonnes.
- Around one thousand of those tonnes were pared off its structure during a five-year renovation programme launched in 1980.
- By night, a pair of rotating spotlights beam out from the top of the tower, visible up to 80km from the French capital. After 23:00, 20 000 twinkling bulbs switch on for ten minutes every hour until 01:00 or 02:00, depending on the season.
- It takes 60 tonnes of paint to cover the tower. Originally a reddish brown, the color used now is Eiffel Tower Brown in three shades, the darkest at the bottom and lightest at the top. Painters need 1 500 brushes to complete a new coat, applied every seven years.
