Eiffel Tower closed in row over women removed for Hindu group

The Eiffel Tower was closed on Monday because of a strike by staff over the removal of female colleagues during a visit by a Hindu religious group, workers and management said.

The visit came on the same day as a cultural boat procession on the Seine organised by the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS) spiritual movement.

In a statement, Eiffel Tower staff condemned "professional instructions that led to female employees being sidelined, replaced and made invisible because of their sex" during the visit by the delegation.

The operating company that runs the Paris landmark, SETE, acknowledged that the Hindu delegation had requested the visit be organised so as to limit "interactions with women" and said that "these conditions should not have been accepted".

The French capital's socialist mayor Emmanuel Gregoire said on X it was "unacceptable" that the Tower management agreed to the delegation's conditions.

The Tower, which receives nearly seven million visitors a year according to its website, was closed all day on Monday, but will open as normal on Tuesday according to a staff representative.

"We are going to shed light on what happened, and we will draw the necessary conclusions," SETE president Ariel Weil, who is also a socialist elected official in Paris, told AFP.

BAPS, which is close to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling conservative Hindu nationalist party, consecrated its first major temple in France on Sunday, near Paris.