For years I wanted to visit the Catacombs of Paris, but I could never find a partner willing to join me on a trip into the depths of the earth. And honestly, that didn’t surprise me much. Few people decide, of their own free will, to walk through dark tunnels full of bones and skulls when they could instead visit a museum, stroll through one of Paris’s beautiful gardens, like the Luxembourg Gardens or the Tuileries, or simply sit at a café and watch the world go by.
I was just about to give up and head underground on my own when I suddenly found someone who, just like me, wanted to visit the catacombs but had never found a partner for this particular adventure. That “someone” was none other than Dr. Orna Liberman, my good friend and an expert on French culture, whose many articles have become an important part of this website.
To my delight, Orna was also looking for a partner for this slightly morbid adventure, so we decided that when we met in Paris in September 2021, we would go together and visit the catacombs. And so, on an autumn day, after a wonderful meal on Rue Daguerre (you can read about the restaurant in my article on the best restaurants in Paris), the two of us descended a spiral staircase about 20 meters into the belly of Paris to meet roughly 6,000,000 dead Parisians.
Important 2026 update (the reopening): The Catacombs of Paris reopened to the public on April 8, 2026, after a large-scale modernization project. Because of demand and limits on group size, booking tickets in advance is strongly recommended. The updated ticket price is 31 euros per adult (including the audio guide). The new route offers upgraded scenography, a unique sound experience, and is now better accessible to visitors with visual and hearing impairments.
The Catacombs of Paris: Visitor Information
In my opinion, despite the discomfort and mild claustrophobia the place can bring on, the Catacombs are a fascinating spot and worth visiting at least once. If you want to fit the Catacombs into your next trip to Paris, here is everything you need to know.
How do you get to the Catacombs?
Address: 1 Av. du Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy.
The easiest way to get there is by metro (which is also a nice way to get used to being underground). Take line 6 or RER B and get off at Denfert-Rochereau. The entrance to the Catacombs is a short walk from there.
Buying tickets for the Catacombs of Paris
In the past you could buy tickets at the box office, but after the major renovation and the 2026 reopening (and given that groups are now capped at 15 people per tour), you’ll find that without booking ahead, you’ll likely face a very long line, or worse, you won’t get in at all.
I strongly recommend buying your Catacombs tickets in advance, even if it costs a little more. The updated official price as of 2026 is 31 euros (25 euros for the reduced rate), and it includes the new, upgraded audio guide. You can buy tickets on the monuments page of this site.
If you’ve already decided to visit, I highly recommend taking a guided tour of the Catacombs so you can hear more interesting historical stories that I didn’t have room to include here. Here are a few good options to choose from:
Opening hours
The site is open Tuesday to Sunday, from 9:45 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. (last entry at 7:30 p.m.), and closed on Mondays and on a few public holidays.
The big 2026 renovation: what’s new at the Catacombs?
If you heard that the site was closed for a long stretch, you heard right. On November 3, 2025, the Catacombs closed for five months for a massive modernization project costing about 5.5 million euros, and they reopened with great fanfare on April 8, 2026. The goal wasn’t just to preserve and stabilize the crumbling bones and corridors, but to completely upgrade the visitor experience for the more than 600,000 people who come each year.
The new scenography (the design of the display), created by the agency La Fabrique Créative under designer Henri Joaquim, turns the walk through the tunnels into an “immersive” experience. In practice that means sophisticated architectural lighting that highlights the geometric patterns of the bones, combined with a unique, brand-new sound design that heightens the mysterious feeling underground. As part of the work, accessibility at the site was also significantly improved, and the route was adapted for visitors with visual and hearing impairments. The renovation also upgraded the ventilation system in this especially damp environment, twenty meters below ground.
This project, overseen by figures such as Camille Guérémy, director of Artemis Architectes, also faced an unprecedented technical challenge: balancing respect for the site with the constraints of an underground environment. With nearly 600,000 visitors a year before it closed, the site now hopes to draw even more. This is a legacy worth reclaiming.
The tour route through the Catacombs
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. The descent can be a little tiring, but it’s part of the experience and eases visitors into the special atmosphere of the place.
Once you reach the bottom, you enter a sprawling network of underground corridors and chambers. Along the corridors you can see inscriptions and drawings from the 18th century, from when the Catacombs served as a quarry for the city’s statues and buildings. In the burial chambers you’ll see bones and skulls arranged in striking displays, laid out artistically to create a fascinating and unsettling sight.
Along the way you’ll find information points that give historical details and explanations about the Catacombs and the surrounding area, including interactive displays and informational signs.
Besides the burial chambers, the Catacombs also include rooms used for art exhibitions and special displays. Contemporary artists show works inspired by the site, offering a fresh, modern take on this historic place.
The tour ends at an official exit from the Catacombs, located in a different area from where you entered. Once the tour is over, you can head back up to street level 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, hospital grounds, and a handful of cemeteries located in the center of the city. The most famous of these was “the Holy Innocents” (Les Innocents), named after a church that dated back to the 9th century. (By the way, the “innocents” the church was named for were the children who, according to Christian legend, Herod ordered killed to prevent the coming of Christ.)
Over the years these cemeteries filled up, and that led to outbreaks of disease. The reason was that, often after heavy rain, the remains of the dead would wash out and end up, more than once, at the Parisian wholesale market (Les Halles), which stood not far from the cemetery.
Matters came to a head in 1774, when the cellars of houses near the cemetery began collapsing under the pressure of the countless bodies buried in the graves above (try to imagine going down to your cellar for a bottle of wine and suddenly finding a hand poking out of the wall).
In response, the city council decided to clear out the old cemeteries and open new ones outside the boundaries of Paris at the time (you can read about them in the article The Cemeteries of Paris: If Only the Tombstones Could Talk…). But that raised a new question: what to do with all those millions of dead buried in the soil of the City of Light?
The answer to that question came from the chief of the Paris police, Jean Charles Lenoir (1732-1808), while he was actually trying to solve a completely different problem.
The quarries of Paris become the Catacombs
Paris has always had quarries that produced the famous limestone used to build nearly every historic building in the city. Throughout history, once a quarry was emptied out, it was simply abandoned and forgotten, but over the years buildings were constructed on top of those quarries, and the fact that they stood over empty tunnels damaged their foundations, causing them to sink at best, or collapse at worst.
One example was the Church of Sainte-Geneviève (the future Panthéon), which was built over quarries in the Latin Quarter. As a result, its foundations had to be rebuilt, which delayed construction and caused a great deal of grief for its architect.
To solve this problem, the official in charge of the quarries for the Paris police began reinforcing the old quarries and connecting them with tunnels. As a result, an entire underground city of quarries and tunnels gradually took shape beneath 18th-century Paris.
The chief of the Paris police, who oversaw the official in charge of the quarries, put two and two together and realized that this underground city could become a fitting resting place for the remains of Paris’s residents. Lenoir took the idea to the king of France, received his approval, and in 1786 the transfer of bones from the cemeteries of Paris to the Catacombs began.
And so, for several years, night after night, processions of clergy dressed in black moved through the streets of Paris toward the entrance to the Catacombs to deposit the remains of the dead. Over the years, this emptied out the cemetery of the Holy Innocents, along with other cemeteries, such as that of the “White Cloaks” church in the Marais, and the Madeleine cemetery, where the king and queen of France would be buried just a few years later (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 remains continued through the 19th century and reached its peak under Napoleon III, when the construction of new boulevards and sewers forced the city of Paris to clear bodies buried in areas slated for demolition. But while in the late 18th century the Catacombs were little more than a practical way to clear Paris of its dead, by the 19th century they had become a genuine tourist attraction.
No century seems to have been as fascinated with death as the 19th. Maybe it was the influence of early-century Romanticism, or maybe it was scientific progress. Either way, places in Paris connected to death became first-rate tourist attractions.
Want an example? Take the city morgue, which once stood behind Notre-Dame Cathedral (where a lovely garden now stands). During the 19th century, the place was packed with tourists coming to gawk at bodies pulled from the Seine, and it became such a huge tourist draw that at certain times it actually outdrew the Eiffel Tower in visitor numbers.
The first person to grasp the tourism potential of the Catacombs and act on it was Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury (1776-1854), the official in charge of the Paris quarries. In 1810, Héricart de Thury decided to arrange the bones into pyramids and other geometric shapes and add signage noting which church each set of remains had come from. He was also responsible for the famous sign: “Stop! This is the empire of death.”
Alongside its rise as a tourist attraction, the Catacombs also became a favored hiding spot, thanks to the darkness and the long corridors where it’s so easy to get lost. During World War II, the Catacombs became a second home for members of the French Resistance, led by Henri Rol-Tanguy (1908-2004), who planned the Resistance’s role in the liberation of Paris from down there.
The Catacombs kept fascinating Parisians even after World War II ended, and plenty of locals still love sneaking in, not necessarily through the tourist entrance, to this day. In 2004, for example, police discovered a fully equipped movie theater with a bar in the Catacombs, used by an underground group of artists called UX (short for Urban Xperiment). When the police came back to the spot, all the equipment was gone, and a note was left on the floor reading “Ne cherchez pas” (“Don’t look for us”).
Our visit: dozens of meters below the streets of Paris
Now that you’ve learned a bit about the fascinating history of the Catacombs, it’s time to return to Orna’s and my own visit, deep, deep underground.
As I mentioned, we reached the entrance to the Catacombs, at Place Denfert-Rochereau, after walking from Rue Daguerre, which you can read about in my article on the most romantic spots in Paris. The square itself, familiar to anyone arriving in Paris via Orly Airport, deserves a word or two before we head underground.
From Place d’Enfer to Place Denfert-Rochereau
The square was created in the 1760s and served as the southern gateway of Paris within the customs wall, built there by the architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806). It was originally called Place d’Enfer (Hell Square), partly because Parisians have never loved paying taxes, and partly for the more prosaic reason that this spot held the main entrance to the Catacombs underground (historians and linguists offer other theories for the origin and meaning of the word “enfer,” but they’re all speculation, and this would take us too far afield).
The city of Paris wasn’t exactly fond of that name and looked for something more “respectable.” The chance to rename the square came with the Franco-Prussian War (1870).
In that war, France was soundly defeated and forced to hand the regions of Alsace and Lorraine over to the newly unified German Empire, proclaimed at Versailles. Despite the decisive outcome, the French tried to find at least one small victory from the war they could build a myth of heroism around, to show the world the defeat hadn’t been total.
That victory came courtesy of an officer named Aristide Denfert-Rochereau (1823-1878). During the war, he defended the fortress of Belfort in eastern France, and unlike the rest of the French army, he refused to surrender and held out through the entire war.
The defense of Belfort had no real effect on the outcome of the Franco-Prussian War, but it gave the French the myth of heroism they badly needed. So, in 1879, a year after the brave officer’s death, it was decided to rename Place d’Enfer (Hell Square) as Place Denfert-Rochereau, so that the name of the square sounded almost the same but carried a completely different meaning.
The brave officer’s nickname was “the Lion of Belfort,” so the French government approached the sculptor Auguste Bartholdi (1834-1904), known today for the Statue of Liberty, and asked him to create a stone lion to be placed in the town of Belfort. Since the sculpture commemorated Denfert-Rochereau’s stand, a bronze copy was placed in the square named after him, and it still watches over the traffic and the crowds there today.
How far do you have to walk to see how many bones?
After admiring the impressive lion statue, we crossed the street and went inside. Since the number of tourists in Paris was much smaller than usual, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we could get away with not buying tickets in advance and just waiting in a short line at the box office.
Once we passed through the gate, we started down a spiral staircase until we reached the depths of the earth. To our surprise, we didn’t find a single bone at first, just a room with a geological display explaining the different layers of soil beneath Paris. We kept going, descending further and further until we reached the corridors carved into the stone.
Luckily, we didn’t need a flashlight, since the corridors were well lit, but as we kept going, the natural claustrophobia that lives in almost all of us started to kick in.
And here’s the catch: if walking through endless corridors tires you out, bores you, or sets off your claustrophobia, you should know there’s no turning back. You have to keep going to the end (on the plus side, you can’t actually get lost in the Catacombs, since the route is built with no junctions where you could accidentally take a wrong turn).
This one-way march, with no chance to turn back, reminded me of an old song about there being no turning back, for better or worse. (Not that it would help to listen to it down there: there’s no signal in the Catacombs anyway.)
And so, after a long walk through empty corridors, we reached the attraction we’d all been waiting for: the bone chambers. There you’ll find millions of skulls and bones packed along the walls or arranged into structures, like pyramids. Next to each one you’ll find a sign explaining where the bones came from.
This is where the visit starts to get really interesting. Not only do you learn about the cemeteries and long-gone churches of Paris, but also about historical events that have been forgotten by collective memory. For example, the bones of people killed in the Réveillon riots are on display deep inside the Catacombs.
Jean-Baptiste Réveillon (1725-1811) owned a wallpaper and paper factory in eastern Paris (that paper, among other things, was used for one of the Montgolfier brothers’ first hot air balloons). In April 1789, he decided that because bread prices had dropped, workers’ wages could be lowered too (or at least that’s how people understood him).
The result was a bloody riot in Paris during which his house and factory were burned, and he himself barely escaped with his life. Many would say, rightly, that this riot was a prelude to the French Revolution, which broke out just a few months later.
I already knew this interesting story, but I never imagined I’d stand face to face with the skulls of those protesters who lost their lives in the bloodbath that broke out in Paris and claimed 25 lives.
We kept walking among the piles of bones until, quite suddenly, we reached the stairs that led us back to the land of the living. And here you have to remember a simple law of physics: if you go down, you have to come back up. The climb back up was done via a spiral staircase and took several long minutes, the exact length depending on your fitness level and that of whoever was ahead of you.
We finally reached the exit, where the diligent guards checked our bags to make sure we hadn’t smuggled out a skull as a souvenir. We stepped out into the soft autumn daylight of Paris. We walked to the nearest café, sat down, had an Orangina, and told ourselves that visiting underground had been interesting, but it was even more fun to get back to the streets of Paris and keep exploring.
And what did my companion take away from the visit? Orna Liberman: reflections and impressions
That same day we had arranged to have lunch at a restaurant on Rue Daguerre. “Eat and drink, for tomorrow we die,” to flip the meaning of the original line from Isaiah. Carpe diem, Horace.
Before our meeting, I stopped by the Catacombs website to check the visiting arrangements. Usually there’s a long, winding line, one that’s burned in my memory to this day. The Catacombs draw a wide crowd, young and old, at all hours, rain or shine.
That day there was no line, and the attendant at the entrance, assuming I wanted to go in right away, encouraged me to come in. I explained that I wanted to come back later with a friend, and he gave me a few tips that will help you too: it’s best to come on a Thursday, a quiet day (it happened to be a Thursday, and luck was with me), with no need to book a ticket in advance. And indeed, we got in without a line and paid 14 euros each instead of the 29 euros charged for booking online ahead of time.
Since then, the site has closed, been renovated, and reopened, and conditions have changed. The full price is now 31 euros, and booking tickets in advance is recommended. See the official website.
Zvi charged ahead, bounding down the stairs with youthful energy. I trailed behind, gripping the handrail for dear life. Not to worry, even though I’m no great walker, the visit didn’t give me any trouble, not on the way down, not through the tunnels, and not on the climb back up to the open air.
Wall after wall of bones, bones arranged in neat rows, dotted here and there with small skulls. And each one seemed to look at me and say, “I was once like you. You will be like me.” “That’s true,” I answered, “and thank you for the warning. It only strengthens my resolve not to waste my time. The things I still want to do, I’ll try to do. What I truly want to do. Or not do. And I’ll steer clear of the blues, because the end comes regardless and puts a stop to it all. Better, then, to make the most of it with good cheer.”
The artistic, almost romantically morbid arrangement of the bones and skulls is the work of engineer Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury, who in 1810 was appointed inspector general of the quarries and held the post until 1830. During those years, Héricart de Thury reinforced and renovated the quarries, continuing his predecessor’s work while decorating and designing the Catacombs.
In 1815, Héricart de Thury published a book called Description of the Catacombs of Paris, which became the basis for everything written about the site afterward. The book is available for free online and is also sold in print.
In it, you can read about a grandiose plan of Héricart de Thury’s that never came to pass. He wanted to transform an abandoned salt quarry, nicknamed “the Lions’ Den,” on Boulevard Saint-Jacques, which had become a haunt for drifters, the poor, and thieves, into a monumental entrance to the Catacombs, approached by a 200-meter avenue of cypress trees.
The shantytown would be torn down and replaced with a grand, gated complex: two villas up the street, one to house the site’s treasury, the other to serve as a waiting room for visitors. A gentle, tree-shaded slope would lead people, some on foot, some by carriage, to the entrance of the underground tunnels. And beneath the cypress trees, a huge monument, part chapel for prayer, part assembly hall for families. Grand tombs and monuments would add further dignity.
The actual entrance to the Catacombs ended up being far less grand, and it sits at Place Denfert-Rochereau rather than Boulevard Saint-Jacques. Where the “Lions’ Den” once stood, there now stands a four-star hotel belonging to the American company Marriott International.
That’s the end of our historical detour. Back to my reflections. Partway through, you come across a well dug by the quarry workers to collect groundwater. The “spring of good faith,” meant to quench the thirst of the righteous, or the “Spring of Oblivion,” from which the dead were said to drink to forget their past before being reborn in a new life.
There’s another, much more prosaic name for this well: “the quarrymen’s foot bath.” This especially clear pool of water once served the workers at the site. It now has a railing, and its name comes from how clear the water is, so clear that in the past visitors sometimes failed to notice it and got their feet wet on the final steps down. The well marks the first geological borehole ever drilled beneath the soil of Paris, meant to determine the mineral makeup of the ground below. The cross-section of the borehole was documented in 1814 by Héricart de Thury.
Passing from one world to another, but for me, someone who has a hard time believing in reincarnation, it was mostly a relief when we climbed back up the steps of the living into the fresh air, onto a street that looked unfamiliar to me. We were both thirsty for the waters of salvation. We sat down on the terrace of a café on a pleasant avenue we’d come out onto, and I asked the waiter where exactly we were. Avenue René Coty, five minutes from the Denfert-Rochereau metro on the left, places I know well under ordinary circumstances.
I highly recommend this unusual visit through a time tunnel beneath the ground, which gave me even more to think about regarding the journey allotted to me, a journey that isn’t over yet.
Hey Zvi, next time, don’t forget the sewers!!!
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