Catacombs of Paris

In the eighteenth century, the cemeteries of the ever-growing city of Paris were running out of space. If that wasn’t bad enough, some bodies weren’t buried properly and were spreading disease. Ultimately, Parisian officials chose to condemn the city’s cemeteries and move the remains they contained elsewhere.

The officials turned to some of the city’s underground quarries. They were able to organize the movement of more than six million bodies underground from the 1780s to 1814, all taken from previously existing graveyards throughout Paris, by transporting the dead via carts and depositing them in their final resting place.

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