Skip-the-line Paris Catacombs tour with special access:
Beneath the city, among the bones
Destination
Paris, France
Duration
2 hours
Tour size
Max 14
Language
English
Overview
Six million people rest in the tunnels beneath the streets of Paris, and most visitors see them from behind a rope. This Paris catacombs tour takes you past the entrance line, past the crowds, and through locked gates into rooms the general public never enters.
- •Skip the entrance line and head straight into the tunnels with a local historian
- •Stand inside a subterranean chapel that hosted religious ceremonies well into the modern era
- •Trace walls stacked floor-to-ceiling with human remains, arranged into patterns over two centuries ago
- •Step behind locked gates into rooms that have been sealed off from the public route for decades
- •Hear how a city on the verge of collapse relocated its dead and saved itself in the process
What's included
- Local English-speaking historian guide
- Skip-the-line entry to the Paris Catacombs
- Special access to restricted areas
You will visit
- The Paris Catacombs tunnels and ossuary
- Restricted-access rooms behind locked gates
- Bone arrangements and sculptural formations
- The quarryman's carvings
- The underground chapel
Get a taste of Skip-the-line Paris Catacombs tour with special access
Select a start time
Choose a tour date
No time slots available for this date
Select tickets & quantity
Total price
What to expect
Past the line and twenty meters down: where the city keeps its dead
Where most visitors start with an hour-long wait on Avenue du Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy, your group starts by walking straight in. Your historian guide leads you underground and into the network of tunnels that sit twenty meters beneath the city streets. The temperature drops, the noise of Paris disappears, and the first walls of bones come into view.
The Empire of the Dead: six million stories in stone
The ossuary tunnels stretch for over a mile, lined floor-to-ceiling with human remains relocated here across decades. In the late 18th century, Paris's overflowing cemeteries threatened public health and the stability of entire neighborhoods. City planners emptied every cemetery in Paris and relocated the remains to abandoned limestone quarries that were already threatening to swallow city blocks from below. The patterns of skulls and femurs you see today took decades to arrange.
"People rush the public route in forty minutes. We take two hours, and half of what I show them isn't on that route."
Eleanor,
WalksDevour Paris historian
"The quarryman's carvings are my favorite stop. He carved a miniature fortress down here in the 1700s, and most visitors have no idea it exists."
Amber,
WalksDevour Paris historian
Recent reviews & recommendations
Frequently asked questions
Our guides love answering your questions. Here are some things they’d like you to know before you arrive.
Seize every moment in Paris
Night tour of the Louvre: Meet the Mona Lisa without the crowds
A day at the palace: Paris to Versailles day trip
Paris in a day tour: Louvre, Montmartre, and the Seine
