Are there tunnels full of skeletons underneath Paris?

The Catacombs of Paris is an underground ossuary in Paris that houses the remains of nearly six million people. Back in 1786, the entire underground population of Paris' cemeteries was relocated to quarry tunnels outside the city limits. Visitors can now explore the caverns and tunnels where the bodies were relocated.



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Descend beneath the streets of the city center and you'll find the Paris Catacombs, a vast network of intricately arranged human bones that tell a different side of the city's history.

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To ensure preservation of the site, you must not eat or drink on the site circuit, and animals are not allowed. Any kind of alcohol is prohibited. And, of course, you must not touch the bones, which are the fragile remains of millions of Parisians.

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In September 2004, French police discovered an underground movie theatre run by La Mexicaine De Perforation. The makeshift theatre contained a movie screen, a well stocked bar, and a kitchen. Telephones and electricity were brought in from an unknown location.

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Sixty-five feet underground (twenty meters), beneath the iconic streets of Paris remains another world; a world full of darkness, death, suffering: here lies the bodies of roughly six million Parisians.

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The Catacombs of Paris is an underground ossuary in Paris that houses the remains of nearly six million people. Back in 1786, the entire underground population of Paris' cemeteries was relocated to quarry tunnels outside the city limits. Visitors can now explore the caverns and tunnels where the bodies were relocated.

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That year, a prolonged period of spring rain caused a wall around Les Innocents to collapse, spilling rotting corpses into a neighboring property. The city needed a better place to put its dead. So it went to the tunnels, moving bones from the cemeteries five stories underground into Paris' former quarries.

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A clutch of noteworthy remains were transferred from Parisian cemeteries to join Robespierre in the Paris Catacombs, including those of architect Salomon de Brosse, who designed Paris's stately Luxembourg Palace; famous French fairytale and fable writers Charles Perrault and Jean de La Fontaine, and painter Simon Vouet ...

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It's currently estimated that the catacombs consist of 320 kilometers of tunnels, but specialists have only mapped a portion of the ossuaries. The city sometimes relies on the knowledge of local cataphiles, urban explorers who tour the mines illegally.

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Not for the faint of heart, the Catacombes de Paris are home to the bones of over six million late Parisians. Its narrow subterranean passageways date back to the 13th century, when they were used to mine the limestone that helped build the city.

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Some 200 miles of labyrinthine tunnels are believed to exist. Despite the vast length of the tunneled, underground world, only a small section of it is open to the public. This tiny portion, known as Denfert-Rochereau Ossuary, or more popularly, “The Catacombs,” has become one of the top tourist attractions in Paris.

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The Cemetery of the Innocents was so overpopulated that in 1780 the wall of a hotel collapsed and bones flooded the basement. It was then that it was decided the cemetery would be closed and the bones transferred to the stone quarries underground.

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Even though it's illegal to access parts of the catacombs other than the site open to visitors, there's a group of urban explorers called “Cataphiles” who navigate the tunnels secretly.

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Hygiene. Both catacombs were dug largely for hygiene reasons. Rotting bodies in the middle of a city is not ideal, especially when they start piling up as they did in Paris. Both catacombs were created to avoid disease, but in Rome, they thought ahead.

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