What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Paris? The Eiffel Tower? Romance? The city known for its love of Fashion?

What some people might not know or remember is that Paris is also home to a very large tunnel network for stone quarries that was re-purposed for holding the remains of six million people, directly underneath the city. The Catacombs of Paris is an interesting, scary and sometimes even dangerous place to visit.

But how did an old system of tunnels used for mining become France’s biggest cemetery? It all started in 1780 when Paris was still burying their dead normally in cemeteries. Though burying normally isn’t really the right word for it since they were facing the problem of having too many dead to bury and not enough space for it at the time. They haphazardly placed bodies wherever there was space with many placed inside the walls, on the roof or the designated burial sites. It got so bad that the basement of a house living near a cemetery was suddenly flooded with bodies because of the wall collapsed from the sheer weight of the bodies.

At roughly around the same time, a house collapsed due to it being built directly under one of the old mining tunnels that was used to mine the stone. The method in which the miners dug for stone in Paris was very haphazard and since most of these mining operations were illicit, they never kept records. And so the investigation and reinforcement of the mines began, with them mapping out the mines again. To this day, they still haven’t mapped out the entire tunnel system because of the sheer size and danger of cave-ins.

The people in charge of mapping out and strengthening the mines was also in charge of handling the cemetery issues, and so they decided to just move the overflowing bodies into the mines while they renovate it. They saw the opportunity and took it, and so the Catacombs of Paris was created.

Nowadays, the Catacombs are accessible to people who wish to take a stroll around the walls lined with bones and skulls. However, only a small part of the catacombs is open to the public as they have walled off or marked areas that are off-limits to tourists or any would-be adventurers. With good reason too, since the catacombs are very confusing to navigate in. It’s very easy to lose your way in the catacombs and not be able to find a way back to the surface. With nobody patrolling the deeper parts of the catacomb, you could possibly end up in an uncharted area of the mines, never to be seen again.

There have been multiple cases where reckless people decided that their tour was too boring and took off on their own. The luckiest were found immediately, some were found alive, but starved and thirsty after a few days and those least fortunate were never seen again. So take heed if you want to visit this tourist attraction, to always follow your tour guide or the signs and never stray from the group.

Written by: Edwin Soewono – Student of Hotel and Tourism Business 2015