Catacombes de Paris

The Catacombes de Paris occupy a network of former limestone quarries beneath the 14th arrondissement that were mined from Roman times through the 18th century to build much of the city above. In the 1780s, cave-ins linked to the exhausted quarries combined with the overflowing Cimetière des Innocents, whose mass graves were contaminating nearby wells, prompted the crown to convert part of the tunnel network into an ossuary. Beginning in 1786, the remains of an estimated six million Parisians were transferred by night in religious processions from the Innocents and dozens of other closed cemeteries and charnel houses, continuing intermittently until 1860. Inspector General Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury organized the bones into their present decorative arrangement in the early 19th century, stacking femurs and skulls into walls and columns and adding carved lintels, plaques, and verses drawn from the Bible and classical authors that warn visitors of mortality. The public route covers about 1.5 kilometers of the roughly 320-kilometer quarry network, entered via a spiral staircase of more than 130 steps near Place Denfert-Rochereau and exiting through another stairwell several blocks away; the rest of the tunnels remain closed to the public, though a subculture of unauthorized explorers known as cataphiles has long used other access points. The site briefly served as a Resistance command post during the German occupation of Paris in the Second World War, and the quarries above the visited ossuary hosted a Nazi bunker. Restoration and stabilization work continues on the tunnel walls, and mandatory timed online ticketing was introduced to control the volume of visitors moving through the narrow, damp corridors.