The Most Beautiful Cemeteries in Europe

18 places in 10 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Catacombs of Paris

   Catacombes de Paris

   France · 3.1 km from Paris48.834° N 2.332° E

   

   The story begins with the ground giving way. Much of the Left Bank sits on Lutetian limestone that had been mined, often without records, since the Middle Ages, and in 1774 a house on the rue d'Enfer collapsed into an old quarry. Louis XVI set up an inspection service to shore up the tunnels. At the same time the cemetery of the Holy Innocents, near Les Halles, had become a public health scandal; in 1780 a cellar wall beside it gave way under the weight of the mass graves. The solution was to move the dead into the consolidated quarries, and from the late 1780s covered wagons carried remains across the city by night. The Innocents alone had been used for some six centuries.

   Did you know? Philibert Aspairt, a doorkeeper at the Val-de-Grâce hospital, vanished in the quarries in 1793; his body was found eleven years later, a few metres from an exit staircase.

   More about Catacombs of Paris →

2. 02 Merry Cemetery

   Romania · 35.8 km from Baia Mare47.971° N 23.696° E

   

   Pătraș didn't flatter anyone. A drinker gets a verse about the bottle that killed him; people are shown at the trade or habit they were best known for, painted in flat, bright colors against a specific shade of deep blue the region now calls Săpânța blue — a color Pătraș said stood for hope and sky, set against green for life, yellow for fertility, red for passion, and black for death.

   Did you know? One of the best-known crosses carries a son-in-law's teasing verse about his mother-in-law.

   More about Merry Cemetery →

3. 03 Monumental Cemetery of Milan

   Cimitero monumentale di Milano

   Italy · 2.4 km from Milan45.486° N 9.179° E

   

   Visitors enter through the Famedio, a long, monumental entrance building in a Neo-Medieval idiom of striped marble and stone, conceived as a hall of fame for the city's most distinguished citizens. At its centre lies the novelist Alessandro Manzoni, author of The Betrothed, and memorials to many other notable Milanese surround him. Beyond the Famedio the grounds open into avenues lined with tombs in every style of the late 19th and 20th centuries: miniature Greek temples, Art Nouveau reliefs, Symbolist figures and stark modernist volumes, including a scaled-down copy of Trajan's Column.

   Did you know? The tomb of the Campari family, of aperitif fame, displays a large sculpted version of the Last Supper.

   More about Monumental Cemetery of Milan →

4. 04 Vienna Central Cemetery

   Wiener Zentralfriedhof

   Austria · 7.9 km from Vienna48.151° N 16.438° E

   

   Distance made the new cemetery unpopular, so the city gave people a reason to come: honorary graves. Beethoven and Schubert were moved here in 1888, and Brahms, Johann Strauss II and Arnold Schoenberg lie in the same section, with a memorial to Mozart, who is buried in the nearby St Marx Cemetery. The architecture came next. Max Hegele won a competition in 1903 and built the monumental main gate, Gate 2, with its two funeral halls, the new arcades, and finally the domed Church of St Charles Borromeo from 1908 — one of the great Art Nouveau churches of Vienna, with the crypt of the Austrian presidents in front of it.

   Did you know? A Viennese joke says the Central Cemetery is half the size of Zurich but twice as much fun.

   More about Vienna Central Cemetery →

5. 05 Père Lachaise Cemetery

   France · 3 km from Paris48.861° N 2.394° E

   

   At first nobody wanted to be buried so far from town: in 1804 it held just 13 graves. The administrators responded with a publicity campaign, moving the remains of the playwright Molière and the fabulist La Fontaine here with great ceremony in 1817, followed by the supposed remains of the medieval lovers Abélard and Héloïse, whose Gothic canopy still draws letters from the lovelorn. It worked. By 1830 there were 33,000 graves, and the cemetery had to be enlarged five times.

   Did you know? French customs refused to treat Jacob Epstein's sphinx for Oscar Wilde as art and charged import duty on the value of its 20-tonne stone block.

   More about Père Lachaise Cemetery →

6. 06 Old Jewish Cemetery, Prague

   Czech Republic · 0.5 km from Prague50.090° N 14.417° E

   

   Among those buried here are figures of the golden age of Prague Jewry around 1600: Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the Maharal, who died in 1609 and whose Renaissance tomb is still a place of pilgrimage; Mordecai Maisel; the chronicler and astronomer David Gans, who worked with Tycho Brahe; and the Chief Rabbi David Oppenheim, whose great library is now at Oxford.

   Did you know? Researchers estimate that in places the graves are stacked ten or even twelve layers deep.

   More about Old Jewish Cemetery, Prague →

7. 07 Necropolis of Pantalica

   Pantalica

   Italy · 28.1 km from Syracuse37.133° N 14.983° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The necropolis served a community that flourished on the plateau from about 1250 to 650 BC, during the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages, before and during the first Greek settlement of Sicily. The tombs are grouped into five main cemeteries, known as Filiporto, North West, Cavetta, North and South, and their date shifts from one area to another. On the summit stand the foundations of the so-called Anaktoron, or prince's palace, a multi-roomed building of large stone blocks whose date is debated: some see it as a Late Bronze Age residence inspired by the palaces of the Bronze Age Aegean, others as much later.

   Did you know? Around 1050 BC the community seems to have moved away to the Cassibile area, returning to Pantalica in the first half of the 9th century BC.

   More about Necropolis of Pantalica →

8. 08 Catacombe dei Cappuccini

   Italy · 1.9 km from Palermo38.112° N 13.339° E

   

   The effect today is of a vast, silent gathering. The halls are sorted by category, with separate corridors for friars, priests, professionals, men, women, virgins and children, and the clothes span three centuries of fashion, from clerical vestments to the everyday dress of each generation. A census in 2011 counted about 1,250 mummified bodies among roughly 8,000 dead. Relatives once visited regularly, prayed with the deceased and paid for their upkeep; when payments lapsed, a body could be moved off its niche to a shelf. The catacombs were officially closed to new burials in 1880, but exceptions continued into the twentieth century.

   Did you know? In 2009 researchers identified Salafia's embalming formula: formalin, alcohol, glycerin, salicylic acid and zinc salts, the last giving the body its rigidity.

   More about Catacombe dei Cappuccini →

9. 09 Skogskyrkogården

   Sweden · 5.7 km from Stockholm59.276° N 18.099° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The approach is the lesson. From the colonnaded entrance the route divides, and a large granite cross stands against the open sky — an image the architects linked to the romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, while insisting it could be read by anyone, believer or not. Another path leads through a pastoral landscape with a pond to a tree-crowned hill for meditation. Ahead lies the Woodland Crematorium with its chapels of Faith, Hope and the Holy Cross, Asplund's last work, completed in 1940 just before his death and a key building of Nordic modernism.

   Did you know? The 1915 competition drew 53 entries, and the winners Asplund and Lewerentz were both only about 30 years old.

   More about Skogskyrkogården →

10. 10 Catacomb of Priscilla

    Catacombe di Priscilla

    Italy · 4.2 km from Rome41.930° N 12.509° E

    

    What draws people underground is the painting. In the so-called Greek Chapel, a small square chamber decorated in the third century, scenes from the Old and New Testaments cover the walls, among them the scene known as the Fractio Panis, the breaking of bread. Close by is a faded image of a woman holding a child beside a standing figure: it is generally read as the Madonna and Child with the prophet Isaiah, and is counted among the oldest known images of Mary, dating from the early third century. There is also an early image of the Good Shepherd, scenes of the three youths in the fiery furnace and of the raising of Lazarus.

    More about Catacomb of Priscilla →

11. 11 San Michele Cemetery, Venice

    San Michele

    Italy · 1.3 km from Venice45.447° N 12.347° E

    

    At the landing stands San Michele in Isola, designed by Mauro Codussi and begun in 1469, usually counted as the first Renaissance church in Venice. Its white Istrian stone facade, with a curved crown and crisp classical order, looks almost austere after the Gothic lace elsewhere in the city, and it set a pattern Venetian architects followed for decades. Inside the walls the cemetery is laid out in geometric fields and cloisters, divided by confession into Catholic, Orthodox and Evangelical sections. Land here has always been scarce, and for most Venetians burial is temporary: after some years remains are moved to ossuaries, a practice with deep roots in the lagoon.

    Did you know? Under Austrian rule the monastery became a political prison, where the patriot writers Silvio Pellico and Pietro Maroncelli were held.

    More about San Michele Cemetery, Venice →

12. 12 Highgate Cemetery

    United Kingdom · 7.5 km from London51.567° N 0.147° W

    

    The West Cemetery holds the great Victorian set pieces. The Egyptian Avenue, a passage lined with vaults, leads to the Circle of Lebanon, a ring of sunken catacombs built around an old cedar of Lebanon; both are Grade I listed. The original cedar, around 280 years old, had to be felled in 2019 and has been replaced. Higher up are the Terrace Catacombs and the Julius Beer Mausoleum, and the paths wind among angels, draped urns and ivy-covered obelisks. Michael Faraday, Christina Rossetti and George Michael are buried on this side.

    Did you know? Marx was first buried in a grave about 100 yards away; in 1954 the remains were moved to the present site.

    More about Highgate Cemetery →

13. 13 Necropolis of stecci at Radimlja, the historic site

    Nekropola Radimlja

    Bosnia and Herzegovina · 29.9 km from Mostar43.093° N 17.923° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The necropolis holds 133 stones, set in rows beside the road. They take almost every form the type is known for: flat slabs, chests, tall chests on plinths, and gabled "sarcophagi" that look like little stone houses. Nearly half are decorated, in relief or by engraving, and the finest are the tall chests reserved for the local elite. The oldest pieces go back to the late fourteenth century, but most were carved between the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth century, and the limestone came from the hill of Ošanjići above the site.

    Did you know? One epitaph says that good Radoje, son of voivode Stipan, lies on his own patrimony at Batnoge, the medieval name of the settlement.

    More about Necropolis of stecci at Radimlja, the historic site →

14. 14 Glasgow Necropolis

    United Kingdom · 0.5 km from Glasgow55.863° N 4.231° W

    

    The cemetery covers 37 acres and holds about 3,500 monuments over some 50,000 burials. Its approach is theatrical: from the cathedral side, visitors cross a ravine by a bridge completed in 1836 and known as the Bridge of Sighs, after the one in Venice, before passing through ornamental gates of 1838 and climbing winding paths past ever larger tombs. The merchants, industrialists and shipowners of the second city of the Empire competed here in stone, and the roll of designers reads like a history of Glasgow architecture: Alexander "Greek" Thomson, John Bryce, David Hamilton, and the young Charles Rennie Mackintosh, whose Celtic cross for Andrew McCall dates from 1888.

    Did you know? The Jewish enclosure held only 57 burials before it was declared full in 1851; its entrance facade of 1836 imitates Absalom's Pillar in Jerusalem.

    More about Glasgow Necropolis →

15. 15 Mirogoj Cemetery

    Mirogoj

    Croatia · 2.3 km from Zagreb45.836° N 15.984° E

    

    Bollé's arcades are the great sight. Construction started in 1879, only three years after the first burials, and went on for decades; the result is a continuous covered gallery that wraps the burial ground, its walls lined with family tombs, bronze portraits, marble reliefs and mourning figures. Many of the finest Croatian sculptors worked here — Ivan Rendić, Robert Frangeš-Mihanović, Ivan Meštrović, Toma Rosandić, Antun Augustinčić, Dušan Džamonja among them — so that a slow walk under the arches is also a walk through the history of Croatian sculpture. Locals call the place an open-air gallery, and it deserves the name.

    Did you know? When Zagreb was hit by a strong earthquake in 1880, damaging well over a thousand buildings, Bollé's newly started arcades came through unharmed.

    More about Mirogoj Cemetery →

16. 16 Tombs of the Kings, Paphos

    Τάφοι των Βασιλέων

    Cyprus · 2.8 km from Paphos34.776° N 32.405° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    What makes the site remarkable is that many of the tombs imitate the houses of the living. The finest have been sunk into the bedrock around an open central court, surrounded on all sides by a peristyle of Doric columns carved from the rock itself, with doorways leading to burial chambers and niches for the dead. Some walls kept traces of painted plaster. Seen from the edges of these sunken courtyards, they resemble small underground villas open to the sky, a few hundred metres from the sea.

    Did you know? The excavator has linked Tomb 8 to the Ptolemaic royal house, possibly the burial of the last king of Cyprus, who killed himself when Rome took the island.

    More about Tombs of the Kings, Paphos →

17. 17 Catacombs of Domitilla

    Catacombe di Domitilla

    Italy · 4.8 km from Rome41.859° N 12.506° E

    

    The cemetery takes its name from Flavia Domitilla, a woman of the imperial Flavian family of Vespasian, on whose land the earliest burial grounds were dug. Its oldest core, the so-called hypogeum of the Flavians, goes back to the late second century; over the following two hundred years family tombs grew together into a vast communal necropolis, extended downward and outward as space ran out. Christian tradition associates Domitilla with the new faith, though historians are divided on whether she was a Christian herself.

    Did you know? They are named after Flavia Domitilla, a member of Vespasian's imperial family, on whose land they were dug.

    More about Catacombs of Domitilla →

18. 18 Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno

    Cimitero monumentale di Staglieno

    Italy · 2.7 km from Genoa44.430° N 8.950° E

    

    The core is a great quadrangle of arcades climbing toward a domed Pantheon, a deliberate echo of the Roman temple, fronted by a Doric portico and marble figures of prophets. In front of it stands Santo Varni's colossal statue of Faith, some nine metres tall. The real treasure, though, lies in the galleries: row after row of family tombs where the merchant bourgeoisie commissioned sculptors such as Giulio Monteverde, Augusto Rivalta, Leonardo Bistolfi and Edoardo Alfieri to portray grief, piety and, quite openly, status.

    Did you know? Her tomb bears an epitaph in Genoese dialect explaining that she saved her coins through wind, sun and rain so as to be remembered.

    More about Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno →