Primary cilia are microtubule-based organelles involved in key signaling and sensing processes in eukaryotic cells. Unlike motile cilia, which have been thoroughly studied, the structure and the composition of primary cilia remain largely unexplored despite their fundamental role in development and homeostasis. They have for long been falsely regarded as simplified versions of motile cilia because they lack distinctive elements such as dynein arms, radial spokes, and central pair complex. However, revealing the detailed molecular composition and 3D structure of primary cilia is necessary in order to understand the mechanisms that govern their functions. Such structural investigations are so far being precluded by the challenging preparation of primary cilia for cryo-electron microscopy. Here, we developed an enabling method for investigating the structure of primary cilia at molecular resolution by cryo-electron tomography. We show that the well-known "9+0" arrangement of microtubule doublets is present only at the base of the primary cilium. A few microns away from the base the ciliary architecture changes into an unstructured bundle of EB1-decorated microtubule singlets and some actin filaments. Our results suggest the existence of a previously unobserved crosstalk between actin filaments and microtubules in the primary cilium. Our work provides unprecedented insights into the molecular structure of primary cilia and a general framework for uncovering their molecular composition and function in health and disease. This opens up new possibilities to study aspects of this important organelle that have so far been out of reach.We would like to thank the Electron Microscopy Facility (in particular Tobias Fürstenhaupt, Weihua Leng, Michaela Wilsch-Bräuninger) and the Light Microscope Facility from the Services and Facilities of the MPI-CBG for their support. We are thankful to Helin Rägel and Cécilie Martin-Lemaitre for their tips on MDCKII cell culture, Noreen Walker for the Imaris tutorial, and Tim-Oliver Buchholz for denoising cryo-tomography data. We thank Pavel Tomancak, Florian Jug, Dennis Diener, and Jan Brugues for the fruitful discussions and suggestions to the manuscript. We thank Oscar Gonzales for IT support. . developed the cryo-peel-off method, prepared samples for FM and EM imaging, acquired and reconstructed room temperature and cryo-tomograms, contributed to FM data acquisition, analysed EM and FM data, prepared figures, interpreted results, and contributed to writing and revising the manuscript. G.A.V. prepared samples and contributed to data acquisition of the room temperature tomography, analyzed cryo-EM data with subtomogram averaging and tomogram segmentation, analysed EM and FM data, prepared figures, interpreted results, and contributed to writing and revising the manuscript. N.T. analyzed cryo-ET data to average the microtubule singlets, contributed to supplementary figure preparation, contributed to the interpretation of data, and contributed to writing and revising the manuscript. R.M. pre...