You’ve been tasked with rebuilding a crumbling wall, but rather than working with stones or bricks, your job is to stack bones—femurs, tibias, and skulls—atop one another. That was the case for the masons (craftspeople who work with stone, brick, or concrete) who spent last year restoring the Catacombs of Paris. They were part of a broader team of curators, architects, designers, and technicians who carefully brought this dwelling of the dead back to life.
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If These Walls Could Talk
Paris’s creepiest historical attraction just got a facelift.
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Visitors in 1935 carried candles as they walked through the Catacombs.
Julien de Rosa/AFP via Getty Images. Olivier Corsan/Le Parisien/Maxppp via ZUMA Press. Frédéric Soltan/Corbis via Getty Images.
Experts recently rebuilt the walls, stabilizing them but keeping the creepiness.
Catacombs are human-made underground passages used as burial places. The Catacombs of Paris provide a resting place for the remains of more than 6 million people who were buried there between 1785 and 1860, making them the largest catacombs on Earth. The city of Paris started laying its dead to rest in catacombs after its overcrowded cemeteries caused a sanitation crisis.
In the early 19th century, a man named Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury led a project to turn the catacombs into a museum. That’s when workers began building decorative walls out of piles of bones. In the 200 years since, millions of visitors have walked down the 131 steps into the belly of the city to see the famous Catacombs and pay tribute to the dead. But over time, the museum started to show its age. Some of the bones even started to grow mold!
Julien de Rosa/AFP via Getty Images. Olivier Corsan/Le Parisien/Maxppp via ZUMA Press. Frédéric Soltan/Corbis via Getty Images.
Why might it be important for this historic space to be maintained?
This past spring, the Catacombs of Paris reopened following a monthslong renovation. Experts led the project, ensuring the human remains were handled with respect and care. They restabilized the walls and added modernized lighting and ventilation. But the team also prioritized holding on to the Catacombs’ spooky appeal—one femur at a time.
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