The Catacombs of Paris: Not Just for Anonymous Necrophiles

For many years I wanted to visit the Paris Catacombs, but I never had the chance to meet a partner who wanted to join me on a journey deep underground. And honestly, it didn't surprise me that much. Few people would decide, of their own free will, to walk through dark tunnels full of bones and skulls, when at the same time they could visita museumTake a stroll in one of Paris' beautiful gardens, such as Luxembourg Gardens Or eTuileries, or just sit in a cafe and watch the passersby.

I was about to give up and go down into the depths of the earth myself, when I suddenly discovered someone who, just like me, wanted to visit the catacombs but had never found a partner for this adventure. This “someone” was no less than Dr. Orna Lieberman, my good friend and expert on French culture, whose many articles have become an integral and important part of the site.

Fortunately, Orna was also looking for a partner for this slightly morbid adventure, so we decided that when we meet in September 2021 in Paris, we would both go and visit the catacombs. And so on an autumn day, after having a wonderful meal on Daguerre Street (you can read about the restaurant in the article on theRecommended restaurants in Paris), we both descended the spiral staircase about 20 meters into the bowels of Paris to meet about 6,000,000 dead Parisians.

Important update for 2026 (reopening): The Paris Catacombs reopened to the public on April 8, 2026, after a large-scale modernization project. Due to demand and restrictions on group size, It is mandatory (or highly recommended) to book tickets in advance.The updated ticket price is €31 per adult (including audio guidance). The new route offers upgraded scenography, a unique sound experience, and is also better accessible to people with visual and hearing disabilities.

The Catacombs of Paris – Tourist Information

In my opinion, despite the discomfort and slight claustrophobia that the place creates, the catacombs are a fascinating place and worth visiting at least once. If you want to combine the catacombs withYour next visit to Paris, you can find all the necessary information here.

How do you get to the catacombs?

Address: 1 Av. du Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy.

The most convenient way to get there is byMetro (That's how you get used to being underground 🙂 ). Take line 6 or RER B and get off at Denfert-Rocherau station. The entrance to the catacombs is a short walk away.

Buying tickets to the Paris Catacombs

Previously, tickets could be purchased at the box office, but following the extensive renovation and reopening in 2026 (and given that groups are limited to 15 people per tour), you will find that if you have not booked in advance, you will likely have to stand in a very long line, or worse, not be able to get in at all.

Therefore, it is highly recommended to buy tickets for the catacombs in advance, even if it may cost a little more. The official price updated as of 2026 is 31 euros (and 25 euros for a discounted rate), and it includes the new and improved audio guide. Tickets can be purchased atMonuments page on the website.

If you've already decided to visit there, I highly recommend taking a guided tour of the catacombs, so you can hear more interesting historical stories that happened there, which I didn't have time to include in the article. Here are some good options to choose from:

Opening Hours

The place is open every day, except holidays, between 09:45 AM and 20:30 PM.

The Great Renovation of 2026: What's New in the Catacombs?

If you heard that the site was closed for a long time, you are not wrong. On November 3, 2025, the catacombs were closed for five months for a massive modernization project at an investment of approximately 5.5 million euros, and they were reopened with a ceremony on April 8, 2026. The goal was not only to preserve and stabilize the crumbling bones and corridors, but also to completely upgrade the visiting experience for over 600,000 visitors a year.

The new scenography (display design), designed by Henri Joaquim’s La Fabrique Créative agency, transforms walking through the tunnels into an “immersive” experience. This means a combination of sophisticated architectural lighting, which highlights the geometric structures of the bones, along with a unique (and completely new) sound experience that intensifies the mysterious feeling underground. Also, as part of the work, accessibility to the site was significantly improved, and the route was also adapted for visitors with visual and hearing disabilities. The renovation also improved the ventilation system in an extremely humid environment, twenty meters underground.

This project, which was overseen by many women, such as Camille Guérémy, director of Artemis Architectes, also faced an unprecedented technical challenge, balancing respect for the site with the constraints of the underground environment. With nearly 600,000 visitors each year before its closure, the site now hopes to attract more visitors. It is a legacy that must be reclaimed.

Catacombs tour route

The tour begins at the official entrance to the catacombs. From the entrance, you descend a spiral staircase, to a depth of about 20 meters below ground level. The descent can be a bit tiring, but it is part of the experience and immerses visitors in the special atmosphere of the place.

When you reach the bottom, you will enter a network of underground corridors and halls. Along the corridors you will see inscriptions and paintings from the 18th century, when the catacombs were used as a quarry for the city's statues and buildings. In the burial chambers you will see bones and skulls in spectacular displays, artistically arranged in a way that creates a fascinating and moving sight.

During the tour, you will find information stations that provide historical details and explanations about the catacombs and the area. The stations include interactive displays and information signs.

In addition to the burial chambers, the catacombs also have rooms used for art exhibitions and special displays. Contemporary artists present works inspired by the place, giving a new and modern interpretation to the historical site.

The tour ends with an official exit from the catacombs, located in a different area than the one you entered. After you finish the tour, you can return to the surface and continue exploring the city.

The Catacombs of Paris – History

As in many other European cities, until the early 19th century, Parisians buried their dead in churchyards, in their hospitals, and in several cemeteries located in the city center. The most famous cemetery was Les Innocents, named after a church of the same name, which dates back to the 9th century AD (by the way, the Innocents, after whom the church is named, were the children whom, according to Christian legend, Herod ordered killed in order to prevent the birth of Jesus).

Over the years, these cemeteries filled up, which led to the outbreak of epidemics. The reason for this was that often, following heavy rain, the remains of the dead would float out and often end up in the wholesale market of Paris (La God), which was located not far from the cemetery.

The peak came in 1774, when the basements of houses located near the cemetery began to collapse due to the pressure exerted by the many bodies in the graves (try to imagine how you would feel if you went down to the basement to get a bottle of wine, and suddenly discovered a hand sticking out of the wall).

As a result, the city council decided to evacuate the old cemeteries and open new ones, outside the borders of Paris at that time (you can read about them in the article The cemeteries of Paris – if only the graves could talk…). However, here the question arose, what would they do with all those millions of dead buried in the soil of the City of Lights?

The answer to this issue was given by the chief of police of Paris, Jean Charles Lenoir (1732-1808), when he was actually trying to solve a different problem. 

The caves of Paris have become catacombs

Paris has always contained mines that produced its famous limestone, from which almost all of the city's historic buildings are built. Throughout history, when such a mine emptied, it was simply abandoned and forgotten, but over the years, buildings were built on top of these mines, and the fact that they were built on top of empty tunnels damaged their foundations and caused them to sink, at best, or collapse inward, at worst.

An example of this was the Church of Sainte-Genevieve (future Pantheon building), which was built over mines in the Latin Quarter, and as a result, its foundations had to be rebuilt, which delayed construction and caused great distress to its architect.

To solve this problem, the Paris police chief of mines began to reinforce the ancient mines and connect them with tunnels. As a result, a kind of underground city of mines and tunnels gradually emerged in 18th-century Paris.

And so for several years, night after night, processions of black-clad clergymen passed through the streets of Paris on their way to the entrance to the catacombs to bring the remains of the dead there. Thus, over the years, the Cemetery of the Innocents was emptied, along with other cemeteries such as that of the Church of the “White Coats” whichIn the Marais district Or the Madeleine Cemetery, where in not many years the King and Queen of France will be buried (you can read about it in the article Chapelle Expiatoire – the mysterious chapel in the heart of Paris).

The catacombs become a tourist attraction

The process of transferring the remains of the dead continued throughout the 19th century and reached its peak during the reign of Napoleon III when the construction of boulevards and sewers forced the city of Paris to remove the bodies of the dead buried in places that were destined for demolition. However, if during the late 18th century the catacombs were little more than a practical way to rid Paris of the remains of the dead, during the 19th century they began to become a real tourist attraction.

It seems that no century has been as interested in death as the 19th century. Perhaps it was the influence of turn-of-the-century Romanticism, or perhaps it was scientific progress, but either way, places in Paris associated with death became top-notch tourist attractions.

Want an example? Take the municipal morgue, which was located behind Notre Dame Cathedral (Where there is now a lovely garden.) During the 19th century, the place was packed with tourists who came to peek at the bodies pulled from the Seine and became such a major tourist attraction that at certain times it even surpassed the number of visitors to the Eiffel Tower.

The first to realize the tourist potential of the catacombs and act on it was the Paris mines superintendent, Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury (1776-1854). In 1810, Héricart de Thury decided to arrange the bones in pyramids and other geometric shapes and to add signs indicating which church they had been taken from. He was also responsible for the famous sign “You are entering the kingdom of the dead.”

At the same time as the place became a tourist attraction, the catacombs became a favorite hiding place, thanks to the darkness and the long corridors, in which it is very easy to get lost. Thus, during World War II, the catacombs became the second home of members of the Resistance, led by Henri Rol-Tanguy (1908-2004), who planned from there the participation of the underground in the liberation of Paris.

The catacombs continued to fascinate Parisians even after the end of World War II, and many Parisians still like to enter them today – not necessarily through the tourist entrance. For example, in 2004, a cinema with a fully equipped bar was discovered in the catacombs, which was used by an underground group of artists called UX (Urban Xperiment). When the police returned to the scene, all the equipment was gone and a note was stuck to the floor that read “Ne cherchez pas” (Don’t search).

Our visit: dozens of meters below the streets of Paris

After learning a little about the fascinating history of the catacombs, it's time to return to Orna and I's visit - deep, deep underground.

As mentioned, we reached the entrance to the catacombs, located on Denfert-Rochereau Square, from Daguerre Street, which you can read about in the articleLovers' floors in ParisThe square itself, familiar to anyone who comes to Paris fromOrly Airport, worth a word or two before we continue our journey into the earth.

Hell Square becomes Dnepr-Rochereau Square

The square was created during the 60s and formed the southern entrance gate to Paris within the customs wall, which was erected there by the architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux (18-1736). Initially, the square was called Place d'Enfer (Hell Square), both because Parisians did not like to pay taxes, and for the prosaic reason that this place is the main entrance to the catacombs, which are located underground (historians and linguists offer additional explanations for the origin of the word "enfer" and its meaning, but everything is in the realm of speculation and shorthand).

However, the Paris municipality did not like this name very much, and sought a more “decent” name. The opportunity to change the name of the square came during the Franco-Prussian War (1870).

In this war, France was defeated and was forced to hand over the provinces to the unified German Empire, which was proclaimed at Versailles. Alsace וLorraineDespite the unequivocal result, the French tried to find at least some small victory in this war from which they could build a myth of heroism to prove to the world that the defeat was not total.

The Balfour Declaration, as mentioned, had no significant impact on the outcome of the Franco-Prussian War, but it gave the French the myth of heroism they needed. Thus, in 1879, a year after the brave officer's death, it was decided to change the name of Hell Square (Denfer) to Denfer-Rochereau Square, so that the name of the square sounds the same but the meaning is completely different.

The brave officer was nicknamed “The Lion of Balfour,” and so the French government decided to turn to the sculptor Auguste Bartholdi (1834-1904), known to us today for the “Statue of Liberty,” and asked him to create a stone statue of a lion to be placed in the town of Balfour. Since the statue was to commemorate the victory of Dennehy-Rochereau, it was decided to place a bronze replica of it in the square named after him, and it watches over the traffic of cars and people there to this day.

How long do you have to walk to see some bones?

After we finished looking at the impressive lion statue, we crossed the road and went inside. Since the number of tourists in Paris was much smaller than usual, due to the pandemic,Corona, we could afford not to buy a ticket in advance, but to stand in a short line at the box office.

After passing through the gate, we began to descend the spiral stairs until we reached the earth's thicket. To our surprise, we did not find a single medicinal bone, but a room with a geological display explaining the different layers of the earth in Paris. We continued on and descended further and further until we reached the stone-hewn corridors.

And here's the problem: if walking through endless corridors is tiring, boring, or makes you feel claustrophobic, you should know that you can't go back. You have to keep going until the end (at least you can't get lost in the catacombs because the route is built so that there are no intersections where you could accidentally take the wrong turn).

This walk, without being able to turn back, reminded me of the song “If it’s good or if it’s bad, there’s no turning back,” and it’s recommended to listen to it to boost your morale (but first, you have to download it to your mobile phone, because there’s no reception in the catacombs).

And so, after a long walk through deserted corridors, we arrived at the attraction we had all been waiting for: the bone rooms. There you will find millions of skulls and bones crammed along the wall or displayed in various structures, such as pyramids. Next to each such structure you will find a sign explaining where the bones came from.

This is where the visit starts to get interesting. We learn not only about Paris' cemeteries and long-defunct churches, but also about historical events that have been forgotten from collective memory. For example, the bones of those killed in the Réveillon riots, which are displayed in the depths of the catacombs.

Jean-Baptiste Réveillon (1725-1811), owned a wallpaper and paper factory in the east of Paris (this paper was used, among other things, in one of the first hot air balloons of the Montgolfier brothers). In April 1789, he determined that due to the fall in the price of bread, workers' wages could be reduced (or so he was understood to be).

As a result, a bloody riot broke out in Paris, during which his house and factory were burned down, and he himself barely managed to escape with his life. Some would say, and rightly so, that these riots were the prelude toFrench Revolution, which broke out several months later.

I knew this interesting story, but I never thought I would come face to face with the skulls of those protesters who died during the bloodbath that broke out in Paris and claimed the lives of 25 people.

And so we continued walking among the bare bones until, quite suddenly, we reached the stairs that brought us back to the land of the living. And here we must remember a simple physical law: if you go down, you must go up. The climb back was done on spiral stairs and took several long minutes, the length of which was determined by your fitness level and that of the person in front of you.

Eventually we reached the exit, where the dedicated guards checked our bags to make sure we hadn't taken some skull as a souvenir. We stepped outside into the gentle daylight of the Parisian autumn. We went to the nearest cafe, sat down, drank an orange, and told ourselves that it was interesting to visit underground, but it would be even more fun to return to the streets of Paris and continue walking there.

And what did my companion bring to the visit? Orna Lieberman: Reflections and Impressions

That day we arranged to have lunch at a restaurant on Dagger Street. Eat and drink, for tomorrow we die, Isaiah in reverse order. Carpe diem, Horace.

Before our meeting, I went to the entrance of the nearby catacomb site to find out the visiting procedures. Usually, a long, curved line stretches past my hands by now. The catacombs attract a wide audience, young and old, at all hours of the day, rain or shine.

There was no line that day, and the guard at the door, who thought I wanted to visit right away, encouraged me to go in. I explained to him that I wanted to arrive later, accompanied by a friend, and he gave me some tips that will help you too: It's best to come on a Thursday, a less busy day (it happened to be a Thursday, God was with me), without booking a ticket in advance. Indeed, we went in without a line, and each paid 14 euros instead of 29 euros when booking online in advance.

Since the site has since been closed, renovated, and reopened, the conditions have changed. The full price is now 31 euros and it is recommended to book tickets in advance. See the official website.

Walls of bones, walls of bones decorated with neat, slightly protruding rows of small skulls. And each one of them looked at me and said: “I was like you, be like me.” “That’s right,” I replied, “Thank you for the warning. You have strengthened my resolve not to waste my time in vain. The projects I still want to undertake, I will try to carry out. What I really want to do. Or not do. I will also avoid beating the blues because one way or another the end will come and put an end to them, so it is better, if so, to make the most of it in a good spirit.”

The artistic arrangement of the bones and skulls, macabre-romantic, was the responsibility of the engineer Louis-Étienne Aricard de Toury (Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury), who in 1810 was appointed Inspector General of the Quarries and held the position until 1830. During these years, Aricard de Toury strengthened and renovated the quarries, thus continuing the work of his predecessor, while decorating and designing the catacombs.

In 1815, de Toury published a book called “Description of the Catacombs of Paris” which served as the basis for everything written on the site afterwards. The book is available for free online and is also sold in paperback.

You can read about a grandiose plan by De Thory that never came to fruition. De Thory wanted to transform an abandoned salt mine, “The Lion's Den“, its nickname, on the Boulevard Saint-Jacques, which became a den of vagrants, the poor, and robbers, to a monumental entrance to the catacombs through a two-hundred-meter-long avenue of cypresses.

The HaFahonim neighborhood will be demolished and in its place a magnificent, fenced-in complex will be built: two villas up the street, one will house the local treasurer, the other will be used to wait for visitors. A gentle slope, shaded by trees, will lead people, some on foot, some by car, to the entrance to the underground tunnels. And under the cypresses, a huge monument, part chapel for worshippers and part assembly hall for families. Magnificent tombs and tombstones will add dignity.

The entrance to the catacombs is, in the end, much less grand and is located on the Place D'enfer-Rochereau rather than on the Boulevard Saint-Jacques. In place of the "Lions' Den" is now the Four-star hotel Belonging to the American company Marriott International.

So much for a historical pause. Let us return to my thoughts and my writings. Halfway along the way, the visitor comes across a well where workers were hired to collect the waters of the abyss. “The spring of the good waters of faith” that quenched the thirst of the righteous, or “The Fountain of Forgetfulness", she thought the dead would drink to forget the past before being resurrected in a new incarnation.

And another name for a well, much more prosaic, “Carvers' Foot Bath“. The exceptionally clear pool of water was once used by the workers who worked on the site. It is now equipped with a railing and its name derives from the transparency of the water, which caused past visitors to not recognize it and get wet when descending the last steps. The well is the first geological drilling under the soil of Paris, the purpose of which was to determine the mineral composition of the subsoil. The cross-section of the drilling was documented in 1814 by Aricard de Toury.

A transition from one world to another, but for me, who finds it difficult to believe in reincarnation, it was most comfortable when we ascended the stairs of life into the fresh air, into a street that seemed unfamiliar to me. Thirst seized us for the water from the springs of salvation. We sat down on the terrace of a cafe on a pleasant avenue we had come to and I asked the waiter where we were. Aveno René Coty, five minutes from the Dnepr-Rochereau metro on the left, places that are well known to me under normal circumstances.

I highly recommend the unusual visit to the underground time tunnel, from which I gained more and more insights about the journey allotted to me that is not yet over.

Hey, deer, next time, the sewer, don't forget!!!