Père Lachaise Cemetery

Père Lachaise is the largest cemetery in Paris, 44 hectares of tree-lined paths and closely packed tombs on a hillside in the 20th arrondissement, and more than a million people have been buried here. It opened in 1804 as the Cemetery of the East, one of several created outside the old city when the parish graveyards were closed, and takes its popular name from Père François de la Chaise, confessor to Louis XIV, who lived in a Jesuit house on the site. The neoclassical architect Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart laid it out on the model of an English landscape garden, making it the first garden cemetery in Paris.

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.

Today many visitors come on a pilgrimage to a particular name. Frédéric Chopin, Honoré de Balzac, Sarah Bernhardt, Georges Bizet, Colette, Marcel Proust, Amedeo Modigliani, Gertrude Stein and Édith Piaf are all here; the columbarium, under a Byzantine-style dome of 1894, holds the ashes of many more and a cenotaph for Maria Callas. Oscar Wilde's tomb, carved by Jacob Epstein, has been so covered in lipstick kisses that the grease has damaged the stone, and Jim Morrison of the Doors is buried here too. A plan of the cemetery helps, because the graves are packed tightly along the terraced paths.

Père Lachaise is also a place of political memory, handled with restraint. Against the Communards' Wall, 147 fighters of the Paris Commune were shot by government troops during the Bloody Week of May 1871. Nearby stand monuments to the deportees of the Nazi concentration and extermination camps, to foreign volunteers who died for France, and to the victims of disasters such as Air France Flight 447. Albert Bartholomé's Monument to the Dead of 1899 stands over the cemetery's ossuary. It is still an active cemetery, and a quiet refuge for foxes, owls and around a hundred species of birds.

Getting there

The cemetery lies on Boulevard de Ménilmontant in the 20th arrondissement of Paris. Philippe Auguste station on Métro Line 2 is next to the main entrance, and Père Lachaise station on Lines 2 and 3 is about 500 metres away by a side entrance. Paris-Orly Airport (ORY) is about 15 km away.