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The torch for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games was lit in ancient Olympia in a traditional ceremony on Tuesday, marking the final stretch of the seven-year preparations for the Games' start on July 26.

Greek actress Mary Mina, playing the role of high priestess, lit the torch using a backup flame instead of a parabolic mirror due to cloudy skies for the start of a relay in Greece and France. 

It will culminate with the lighting of the Olympic flame in the French capital at the opening ceremony.

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo said the Olympic flame will pass by the site of the 2015 Islamist attack on the Bataclan concert hall as well as the Shoah Memorial as it makes its way through Paris in July.

'This torch is a message of peace, a message of friendship between peoples, which is all the stronger at a time when the world is in such bad shape,' Hidalgo told France 2 TV from Olympia, Greece.