Paris is a historical city, littered with cultural artifacts and monuments from history. However, part of what goes unexplored in a city like this can include features like its catacombs. The Paris catacombs are hidden below the streets of the city itself, with a burial chamber that holds the bones of as many as six million people. These limestone tunnels were built to make room in the crammed city cemeteries.
By the late 1700s, the Parisian cemeteries – such as Les Innocents – were so overflowing with bodies that they were poking out of the ground. So, the time had come to move the bodies of the dead underground. The catacombs were then built, and the cemetery itself was emptied – this took two years of constant movement to do so. The bodies were dumped down old quarry wells, and miners were then ‘asked’ to move these bodies into position.
Other cemeteries within the city began to use the catacombs for the same purpose. This turned them into a somewhat morbid attraction. Today, the ossuary itself lies something in the region of 60ft underneath the floor of the city and can stretch for as long as 200 miles. It was opened up as a tourist attraction in 1809, and today it is still a commonly visited locale for people in the city.
The arrangement of the bodies and bones is something that, whilst quite eerie, is also somewhat impressive from an artistic perspective. The bones were not just piled up in a big randomized collection; they were laid out like decorations. Indeed, there is even The Barrel – a massive collection of tibiae and skull bones that make up what is essentially a pillar to the roof.
The catacombs have also become a place for everything from grim party locales to being used as a meeting place for a revolution. So, these catacombs might carry a rather morbid reason for their being – but they were, and remain, very important to the history of the city of Paris.