How many people have been buried in the catacombs?

It would take the city many years to fully complete the process, eventually moving some six to seven million bodies to the city's underground tunnels. Over the years the Paris Municipal Ossuary eventually came to be known as the Catacombs of Paris (an allusion to the ancient Roman catacombs).



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The cemetery of the Innocents – the largest and most important within Paris' city limits – contained some 2 million bodies. Once you included the rest of the city cemeteries the count came to roughly 6 million sets of remains that needed to be disinterred and reburied somewhere else for the greater public good.

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The Paris Catacombs have a fascinating history which dates back to ancient times, and is the final resting place of over 6 million Parisians.

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In 1789, Paris, France, the world, the course of history was rocked by the French Revolution. From around this date, people were buried directly in the catacombs. This came to an end in 1860 when people ceased to be buried in the catacombs.

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Paris is one of the great medieval cities of Europe. Like Rome, it has vast underlying passageways and quarries, called catacombs. This labyrinth of tunnels is thought to cover around 800 hectares — that's nearly 2,000 acres — beneath the city, though only a small part is explored and open to the public.

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Some areas of the tunnels even became shrines for martyrs buried there. But after Christianity was legalized in 313 AD, funerals moved above ground, and by the 5th Century, the use of catacombs as grave sites dwindled, though they were still revered as sacred sites where pilgrims would come to worship.

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Odessa Catacombs The largest catacomb system in the world. Over 1,500 miles of catacombs are carved into the limestone beneath the city.

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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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Despite the ritual with which they were transferred, the bones had simply been dumped into the tunnels in large heaps. Slowly but surely the quarrymen lined the walls with tibias and femurs punctuated with skulls which form the basis of most of the decorations that tourists see today.

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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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The Catacombs are about 65 feet deep, roughly the height of a five-story building if you turned it upside down. It takes 131 steps to get to the bottom of the Catacombs, so wear your walking shoes.

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The final resting place of six million Parisians, the catacombs are not for the faint of heart! Sixty-five feet beneath the lively streets of Paris lies what is perhaps the City of Light's unlikeliest attraction.

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However, the strong smell of the Paris catacombs is apparently what all the initial signs were warning sensitive visitors about. At best, it could be likened to the dusty, incense-infused scent of old stone churches, but with an underlying malaise that can only be attributed to the contents of multiple cemeteries.

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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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The beginning of the Catacombs were caused from the Bubonic Plague where there were too many bodies to bury. Over the course of Paris's history, there was so much death from disease and war that the cemeteries started to burst from the seams. The solution became burial tunnels which came to be the famous Catacombs.

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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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After Christianity was legalized and as it spread through the empire, catacombs became not only a place where Christians could meet; they also became the place were Christians would bury their dead.

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At first, the catacombs were merely burial places; places where Christians could meet to perform funeral rites and celebrate the anniversaries of the martyrs and the dead. During the persecutions for the third century, Christians used the catacombs as places of momentary refuge for the celebration of the Eucharist.

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