Paris police have seized 60 tonnes of miniature Eiffel Towers that black-market vendors were hoping to sell to tourists.

The French capital is one of the world's top destinations, visited by about 29 million tourists a year, but with the holidaymakers comes an influx of bootleg souvenirs, from trinkets costing a few euros to fake Hermès scarves.

Police play a cat-and-mouse game with the mostly immigrant sellers who flood the top tourist sites, taking business from the authorised vendors and paying no taxes.

Police said on Thursday that the tin trinkets, brightly coloured and barely 8cm high, were seized on Tuesday from a warehouse near Le Bourget airport north of Paris. A woman of Chinese nationality was in police custody.

Authorities say Paris-based Chinese gangs import the trinkets from China and sell them on to other groups, which in turn control the sellers.

Hundreds of black-market sellers hawk their wares around the Eiffel Tower at the height of the summer season, say police.

Flyers are circulated encouraging tourists not to buy from street sellers.

Police said in a statement that they had also raided an office in Paris' central Marais district, where some 100 black-market sellers a day would buy replica Eiffel Towers to sell on. They seized over 150,000 euros in cash from the premises.

However, police are hindered by the inability of over-stretched courts to prosecute the waves of illegal sellers, many of whom come from Senegal and India.

When sellers are caught their goods are confiscated, but they are released because most are unable to pay a maximum fine of 3,750 euros ($5,000).

Few are sent back to their home country because of a bureaucracy plagued by delays, authorities say.

Reuters