Catacombs of Paris

Interesting facts

The ossuary holds the remains of more than six million people, yet it occupies only a small part of the old quarry tunnels beneath Paris.

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.

The Holy Innocents cemetery alone had received about two million burials over some 600 years before its bones were moved underground.

In 2004 police discovered a fully equipped secret cinema in the tunnels under the Trocadéro, complete with a screen, projector, seating and a bar.

In August 1944 the Resistance leader Henri Rol-Tanguy called Parisians to arms from a base in the tunnels, a week before the city was liberated.

The future King Charles X, then Count of Artois, toured the ossuary in 1787, among its very first visitors.

Visits were stopped completely in 1833 because the Church objected to putting human remains on display, and only resumed, four days a year, in 1850.

Héricart de Thury also created a cabinet of minerals found under Paris and a room displaying skeletal deformities collected while the bones were arranged.

The 2014 horror film As Above, So Below was the first production to receive official permission to shoot inside the catacombs.

Why it is worth it

Twenty metres beneath the 14th arrondissement, in tunnels left by centuries of limestone quarrying, lie the bones of several million Parisians. The Catacombs of Paris are an ossuary created to empty the city's overflowing cemeteries, and the walk through them is one of the strangest in any European capital: a long, cool corridor of stone that suddenly turns into walls built entirely of skulls and long bones, stacked with a care that is almost decorative.

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. Among the remains transferred from other burial grounds were those of victims of the Revolution, including Danton, Robespierre and Lavoisier.

The ossuary as visitors see it is largely the work of Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury, who ran the quarry inspectorate from 1810. He had the bones arranged into patterned walls, added monuments and plaques with sombre inscriptions, and sealed the ossuary off from the rest of the tunnel network. The entrance to the bone galleries is marked by the line "Arrête ! C'est ici l'empire de la Mort": stop, this is the empire of Death. Along the route are plaques bearing the names of the streets overhead, the initials and dates that quarry engineers carved into the stone, and a well filled with underground water. The site opened to regular public visits in 1874 and is now one of the City of Paris museums. A major restoration, with new lighting, ventilation and repairs to the bone walls, has recently been completed.

The visit involves 131 steps down and 112 steps back up. The temperature underground stays around 14°C and it can be very damp.

Getting there

The entrance is at 1 avenue du Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy on Place Denfert-Rochereau in the 14th arrondissement of Paris. Denfert-Rochereau station, served by Métro lines 4 and 6 and RER B, is next to it. The nearest airport is Paris-Orly (ORY), about 12 km away.

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia

The Catacombs of Paris are underground ossuaries in Paris, France, which hold the remains of more than six million people. Built to consolidate Paris's ancient stone quarries, they extend south from the Barrière d'Enfer former city gate. The ossuary was created as part of the effort to eliminate the effects of the city's overflowing cemeteries. Preparation work began shortly after a 1774 series of basement wall collapses around the Holy Innocents' Cemetery added a sense of urgency to the cemetery-eliminating measure, and from 1788, nightly processions of covered wagons transferred remains from most of Paris's cemeteries to a mine shaft opened near the Rue de la Tombe-Issoire.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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