Catacombs of Paris

Historic · Denfert-Rochereau, Montparnasse (14th)Paris,France

A kilometre and a half of tunnel twenty metres beneath Paris, walled with the stacked bones of six million people moved out of overflowing graveyards.

The Catacombs of Paris hold the bones of about six million people, twenty metres beneath the Left Bank. You go down a spiral stair, walk a kilometre and a half of low tunnel at fourteen degrees, and come back up in a different street. The walls along the route are built out of the dead: long stacks of leg bones with rows of skulls set into the face, stretch after stretch. A stone at each section names the graveyard those bones came from and the year they arrived. Paris cut its building limestone from under the Left Bank, the workings were never properly propped, and one day a stretch of road above them collapsed and took houses down with it. At the same moment the city's oldest graveyard, sitting in the middle of the food market, had run out of room. So the bones were carted out at night, priests walking behind, and tipped into the empty quarries. The arranging came later: a quarry inspector had them built into the walls you now walk between. Only about two hundred people are allowed below at once, so the wait to get in is longer than you expect and the tunnel itself is not crowded.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The quota is small and fixed — Only about two hundred people are allowed below at any moment, so the day's tickets usually run out and turning up without one often fails.
You come out in a different street — The exit staircase is some way from the entrance, so anything left at the start cannot be collected, and the route runs one way only.
Dress for a cold day whatever the month is — The rock holds one temperature all year, so a summer visitor in shorts feels it far more than a winter one in a coat. Water drips in places.
Leave the flash off — The bone walls are lit low and evenly, and a flash flattens them into grey rubble. Without it you can see the pattern the stacking makes.
The bones come at the end — The route opens with plain quarry galleries and the history of stone-cutting, so keep some time and attention for the ossuary itself.

Things to do

1
Read the date over each wall of bones
Every stretch of the bone galleries carries a carved stone giving the graveyard the bones came from and the year the carts arrived. Stop at one and read it before you look at the wall. The bones in front of you all came from a single parish graveyard and were moved here together, and that carved stone is the only thing that still records which one.
2
Find the quarryman's carving of a harbour fort
On the way to the bone galleries the route passes a wall that a workman carved into a model of a harbour fortress. His name was Décure, and he cut it in his own time in the 1780s, from memory of a place in Menorca where he had been held prisoner. He was killed in the tunnels while digging the stair down to it.
3
Stop at the doorway into the ossuary
A black-and-white doorframe stands across the tunnel with one line cut above it: stop, this is the empire of the dead. Read it, then look at how ordinary the passage is on either side. Everything before that threshold is a quarry and everything after it is a graveyard.