The world's largest bone repository will have its first complete shutdown since opening to the public over two centuries ago.
If you've been putting off that trip to Paris's famous underground cemetery, now's the time to act. The Paris Catacombs are shutting their doors on November 3, 2025, and won't reopen until spring 2026. It's the first time in living memory that this sprawling necropolis, final resting place for over six million deceased Parisians, will be entirely off-limits to the public.
The closure isn't just for routine maintenance. Although workers have been quietly restoring sections since 2023, this upcoming project represents something much bigger - a complete overhaul of what many consider the world's most macabre tourist attraction.
So perhaps it’s best to get your visit in now, before the place is ‘updated’.
Descent into the Parisian catacombs that are open to the public can be a wonderful, if eerie, experience. In order to enjoy the experience safely, make sure you stick to a legitimate guided tour, perhaps by visiting the Paris City Vision site and checking out the catacombs tour packages listed there (Check out Paris catacombs tickets).
When Ancient Quarries Built a City
Looking at the catacombs, you might think the story starts with death, but it actually begins with construction. Way before anyone dreamed of storing bones underground, medieval Parisians were busy carving out the rock beneath their feet to build the city above. And before that, in Gallo-Roman times, workers extracted limestone from what would become a massive underground network spanning about 800 hectares. But even that isn’t where it truly began.
Archaeological excavations have uncovered pre-Roman Celtic artifacts, suggesting the quarrying sites were significant to Parisii tribes centuries before Roman occupation. Stone tools, pottery shards, and ritualistic objects indicate these underground spaces held ceremonial importance long before Christian burials began.
This excavation work wasn’t a random stab in the dark (although it is likely that many of those occurred later in the sprawling labyrinth that was formed). The limestone they were after - geologists call it Lutetian limestone or "Paris Stone" - formed about 45 million years ago when the whole area sat under a shallow sea. The limestone itself contains fossilized remains of ancient sea creatures, creating an additional layer of "prehistoric catacombs" within the stone walls. It's the same rock used in Notre-Dame, the Louvre, and countless other Parisian landmarks. Pretty much everywhere you look in the old buildings of the city center, you're seeing stone that came from these underground quarries.
Medieval miners became pretty sophisticated about their extraction methods. They developed a ‘pillar-and-room’ technique that left behind these incredible, cathedral-like spaces underground. The soaring stone ceilings help you to forget you're 20 meters (65 feet) below street level.
When Paris Had a Grave Problem
By the 1700s, things began to get complicated. All that underground mining had created a serious problem above ground. In 1774, a massive sinkhole opened up on what's now the Rue Denfert-Rochereau and swallowed 300 meters (985 feet) of street. Houses, carts, people - everything just disappeared into the ground. Widespread panic was caused throughout the city as people worried if it would be their street next.
King Louis XVI wasn't about to let his capital city collapse into itself, so on April 4, 1777, he created the Department of General Quarry Inspection. He put Charles Axel Guillaumot in charge of the problem, basically telling him to figure out how to keep Paris from falling into its own basement.
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Interior view of the Paris Catacombs showing the systematic arrangement of human skulls and bones that characterizes this unique underground ossuary, photographed in 2022. (Public Domain)
While Guillaumot was busy trying to keep the city from collapsing, Paris was dealing with another crisis - where to put all the dead people. Holy Innocents' Cemetery, which had been Paris's main burial ground for over 500 years was at full capacity. With five centuries of people being buried in the same relatively small space in the heart of the city, the place was basically a mass grave that never stopped accepting new residents.
Here the grim system for interment at the time: they would dig a big communal pit and just keep throwing bodies in until it was full. That could take months. The corpses would decompose over about five years, then they'd dig them back up and move the bones to a charnel house to make room for fresh bodies. And this had gone on for half a millennium.
By the mid-1700s, about one-tenth of everyone who died in Paris ended up at Holy Innocents. Writer Louis-Sébastien Mercier described the situation, claiming the "cadaverous miasmas" rising from the cemetery were literally poisoning the city's air. He said the vapors were so bad they could sour milk and wine stored nearby.
The whole thing came to a head in 1780 when gases from decomposing bodies actually burst through the cellar walls of houses on the rue de la Lingerie. People living there started getting sick - respiratory problems, vomiting, some even became delirious. That was the final straw. A Royal Ordinance declared Holy Innocents a public health threat and ordered it closed immediately.
Historic 1861 photograph by Nadar showing the final gallery of the catacombs. (Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0)
So now the city had two problems: empty, unstable quarries underground and way too many dead bodies above ground. It didn't take a genius to see the solution, but it did take some serious organization to pull it off.
The Midnight Bone Run
What happened next is one of history's more unusual logistical operations. Starting in December 1785, workers began what was essentially the world's largest moving job - except they were moving corpses instead of furniture, and they had to do it all at night to avoid freaking out the locals.
Every night, crews would show up at Holy Innocents with shovels and wagons. They'd dig up whatever they found - whole bodies, partial remains, just bones - load everything onto carts, and transport it through the dark Paris streets to what were the old quarries. The site was officially consecrated as the "Paris Municipal Ossuary" on April 7, 1786, though it quickly picked up the more dramatic nickname "Catacombs" in reference to the Roman burial sites that were all the rage at the time.
The logistics were mind-boggling. They couldn't just dump everything randomly - Guillaumot's team had to organize the whole operation. Bones got dropped into the quarry shafts, then workers down below would sort and distribute everything throughout the tunnel system. The work continued in phases for decades: the initial Holy Innocents transfer from 1785-1787, then more transfers after the French Revolution through 1814, and finally the last major relocations during Baron Haussmann's renovation of Paris from 1859-1860.
But here's what really makes the catacombs special: between 1810 and 1814, an inspector named Louis-Etienne Héricart de Thury decided that just piling bones around willy-nilly wasn't dignified enough. So he reorganized the entire ossuary, creating those artistic arrangements of skulls and femurs that give the catacombs their distinctive look today.
The place immediately became quite the attraction for\ the great and the good of the time. The Count of Artois (who later became Charles X) brought a group of court ladies down in 1787. Austrian Emperor Francis I took a tour in 1814. Even Napoleon III showed up with his son in 1860. Not your usual family outing, but apparently it was the thing to do at the time to show you were a person of importance.
The careful arrangement of bones that transformed a utilitarian storage space into a contemplative memorial. (Public Domain)
A Long and Storied Past
But there is much more history to be found beneath the streets of Paris. Beyond the well-documented 18th-century ‘refurbishment’, the Paris Catacombs contain notable medieval religious features, often overlooked. Some of the underground complex includes foundations from ancient monasteries demolished during the French Revolution. For example, the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Monastery of Sainte-Geneviève both contribute parts of their infrastructure to the catacomb network. Ancient religious inscriptions in Latin, dating from the 12th and 13th centuries, can still be found carved into limestone walls in some of the restricted areas, offering glimpses into medieval Parisian religious life.
Royal and Elite Burial Traditions
Before the mass cemetery transfers, some of the catacomb sections served as private burial rooms for French aristocrats and merchant families. Intricate stone sarcophagi, some dating back to the 14th century, remain sealed in tunnels inaccessible to public tours. These noble burial chambers feature intricate carved escutcheons, family crests, and Latin epitaphs that provide valuable genealogical information about medieval Parisian elite. Several royal physicians and court officials from the reigns of Louis XIII and Louis XIV were interred in specially prepared chambers that predate the general cemetery relocations by over a century.
Underground Economic Activities
Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, a literal underground economy operated in the subterranean space, which became the setting for a number of legitimate and illicit trades. One large and profitable industry was mushroom cultivation, which sprung up (as mushrooms do) in the 1670s, with entire areas developed into growing operations that supplied the Parisian markets for over 200 years.
The stable underground temperatures were also ideal for use as wine storage cellars, and some champagne houses adopted tunnels as aging facilities.
The catacombs also served as smuggling routes for contraband goods avoiding city taxes, with pulley systems and hidden storage rooms facilitating these underground commercial networks.
Scientific and Medical Research Legacy
The 19th century saw extensive scientific study within the catacombs, particularly regarding public health and anatomy. Medical students from the University of Paris conducted clandestine dissections and anatomical studies using the readily available skeletal remains. Early anthropological research examining skull measurements and bone pathology established important foundations for forensic science. Temperature and humidity monitoring stations, some of which operated continuously for over 150 years, provided crucial data for understanding urban climate patterns and geological stability, contributing to modern engineering practices for underground construction projects throughout Paris.
Wartime Refuge and Resistance Networks
During World War II, the catacombs served as crucial hideouts for French Resistance fighters and Jewish families fleeing Nazi persecution. The Germans established an underground bunker near Place Denfert-Rochereau, while simultaneously, resistance cells operated sophisticated communication networks through the tunnel systems. Hidden caches of weapons, forged documents, and supplies from this period have been discovered as recently as the 1990s. Some chambers still contain wartime graffiti and makeshift living quarters, including improvised kitchens and sleeping areas that housed dozens of refugees for months at a time.
Why They Need This Renovation Now
Fast-forward to today, and the catacombs are once again facing some preservation challenges. When you've got a footfall of 550,000 tourists traipsing through your underground bone repository every year, things start to wear down.
The upcoming renovation isn't just about making things look prettier - though they are planning to upgrade the lighting and fix up the floors. The real issue is preservation. Without proper ventilation and climate control, this unique historical site could deteriorate beyond repair.
They're also planning some educational upgrades that should make the experience more meaningful for visitors. New exhibits will highlight parts of the catacombs' story that haven't gotten much attention, and they're setting up a space for temporary exhibitions. The goal is to keep the site relevant and encourage Parisians to visit regularly, not just tourists checking it off their bucket list.
It's the biggest investment in the catacombs since they first opened to the public by appointment in 1809. Back then, they even kept a visitor register where people could write down their impressions—apparently it filled up pretty quickly because the place was an immediate hit with both French and foreign visitors.
What strikes me most about this whole story is how practical solutions can become something profound over time. The catacombs started as answers to very mundane problems—where to get building stone, how to shore up unstable ground, what to do with too many dead bodies. But somewhere along the way, they became this powerful reminder about mortality and the passage of time.
When the renovation is complete in spring 2026, visitors will still encounter that same profound experience that has drawn people underground for over two centuries. They'll just be doing it in a space that's better preserved and more thoughtfully presented. And maybe that's fitting for a place that has always been about transforming the practical needs of the living into something meaningful for future generations.
Top image: The intricate bone arrangements that give the catacombs their distinctive appearance today. Source: CC BY 2.0
By Gary Manners
References
History.com. (2023). The Dark Origins of the Paris Catacombs. Available at: https://www.history.com/articles/paris-catacombs-origins
Les catacombes de Paris. (n.d.). Site history. Available at: https://www.catacombes.paris.fr/en/history/site-history
Smithsonian Magazine. (2014). Beneath Paris' City Streets, There's an Empire of Death Waiting for Tourists. Available at: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/paris-catacombs-180950160/
Sortiraparis. (2025). Paris Catacombs to be closed for six months from November 2025. Available at: https://www.sortiraparis.com/en/news/in-paris/articles/331285-paris-catacombs-to-be-closed-for-six-months-from-november-2025
