🇫🇷THE CATACOMBS OF PARIS

48°50'09.43"N 2°19'51.70"E

(from History Snob)

    Paris is renowned worldwide for being the "City of Love" with an estimated number of 9000 marriages registered every year. Some reasons for it are the charming boulevards, the funny mimes and the imposing Gothic architecture. But underneath the surface, the Parisian atmosphere disappears completely: instead of love pairs and mimes, a shocking amount of millions of lost souls lays there. Welcome to the Catacombs of Paris, the unknown side of the French capital.

    The Catacombs are basically a big labyrinth packed full of human bones. I know this sounds a bit revolting but it shouldn't be for that much as there are guided tours through it. You just have to get to a square of the 14th Arrondissement in Central Paris, pay the entry ticket and access to the subterranean graveyard (Learn more about the tours). Although, why was this built in the first place?

 

   For that, as in all the other posts of this blog, we have to check history. This time we travel to the Roman Age, when Paris was called Lutetia and had a population of 5000 people, equaling a village in the present day, but being an important town in the era. The point is that Lutetia was located on a limestone layer, a very resistant material that was very appreciated in that time. So when the Frenchmen noticed it, they made an open-air mine that within time became underground as it was used for a lot of buildings such as the city walls or the famous Louvre palace.

The supportive columns that didn't support (Les Catacombes de Paris)

   And of course it was a bad idea to dig on the city's foundation, because it could provoke a collapse. So after some of these accidents, a genius had the idea of putting columns which still can be sighted today. But the builders of these columns weren't geniuses and they didn't help much, so the Authorities had to choose between stop digging and preserving the city or continue digging and burying both the limestone and Paris. They preferred the first one. With that, the mines were forgotten; but ten years later they had to be re-opened because of a different cause.

  The year was around 1787, so you could imagine that the situation in the country was bad, as some years later the unprivileged would create the French Revolution. Conditions were that terrible, that they almost seemed ridiculous like the famous phrase of Marie Antoinette "If you don't have bread, eat cake". But I would bet that the medical situation was even more unbelievable as the cemeteries were so full that they had to remove the bodies and place them somewhere else. That "somewhere" were the old limestone mines, which therefore were renamed to Catacombs.

A sign explaining that this bones came from the Magdalene cemetery (from Atlas Obscura)

  In 1809, they were opened to the public and throughout the years were visited by important royal and political figures such as Napoleon Bonaparte. And if you think that was it, you're wrong. The Catacombs of Paris already served as a mine, as a warehouse for dead bodies, and they did too serve as a shelter. It was the own citizens of Paris who firstly used them for that, later the Nazis would copy their idea and lastly the Free French Forces would place there their Headquarters.

   In the 21st century, they are mainly touristic as I already said, but not all are opened for visitors due to safety risks.  Taking advantage of this, a group of unknown once made an illegal private club out of one of the tunnels and it worked until the police discovered it. There are also some catacomb freaks (didn't know that existed) who illegally access these caves just to explore them. This type of people has the very original designation of "Cataphile".

Map showing the extension of the Catacombs (it is so detailed that you can't read a thing) (From Brilliant Maps)

Sources: Les Catacombes de Paris, Atlas Obscura, Brilliant Maps