Aside from a small part that has been turned into a state-run museum, the catacombs of Paris are closed to the public and visiting them has been illegal since 1955. The author does not encourage any illegal activity on the blog, so treat what follows as a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, or actual places, is purely coincidental.
My favorite cartoon growing up was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. To this day I remain convinced that the 1987 TMNT theme song is one of the best film scores in history, up there with the likes of Hans Zimmer or Yann Tiersen, that pizza is a cornerstone of a healthy diet, and that the underground is a fascinating place well worth exploring. On the other hand, I’ve come to learn that turtles do not make the most interactive pets, and that one is generally better off staying away from the sewers. Now a subterranean network of tunnels that are sewage-free would be a whole other story! Luckily, one of the French capital’s clandestine attractions is exactly that: the catacombs of Paris are a complex multi-level web of abandoned mines spanning about a quarter of the city’s undersurface, mostly on its left bank.
Venturing into the catacombs unaccompanied is a terrible idea. Kind of like scuba diving solo: sure, everything could turn out just fine, but if something goes wrong, it’ll go really, really wrong. How wrong? Imagine getting lost in a pitch-black maze 20 meters below the ground, running out of water and flashlight’s batteries, never to be seen again… Unless you are lucky enough to bump into someone who had a little more sense (the latter is actually not unlikely, so deaths are exceedingly rare - injuries, however, are not). Fortunately, I knew a guy, who knew a guy, who knew two guys, who knew their way around the catacombs. (Such urbex enthusiasts are known as the cataphiles.) Introductions were made, and the date for our descent was set to one of the upcoming Fridays.
A historical interlude
What is now colloquially referred to as the catacombs of Paris, started off 800ish years ago as underground quarries. Turns out, the Romans had the controversial habit of mining stone pretty much right underneath the city that they were building at the time. This practice continued throughout the Middle Ages, resulting in some embarrassing mishaps of a street caving in here, and a house falling through there. Despite these civil engineering setbacks, the city’s population kept on growing, and what happens when you have more people living somewhere? Naturally you get more people dying in that place, i.e. a growing number of bodies to bury. At some point, the French capital was home to over three times as many dead Parisians as live ones, and with ever-rising real estate prices, that simply could not stand! In the XVIII century, a decision was made to dig up some of those long-gone citizens and move their remains underground, into a section of the mines that came to be known as the catacombs. Eventually, the entire 300+ km long network of the underground passages was dubbed as such, including the parts that were never used for human burial. Throughout the following centuries, revolutions, and wars, the catacombs have been used as an ossuary, a storage space, a hideout, and, more recently, a popular destination for urban explorers. Venturing down these tunnels was outlawed in 1955, but the cataphile community is going strong to this day.
The catacombs being illegal and all, I figured that posting photos taken there would be unwise. That’s why I created some mixed media illustrations instead. Want to see more of my artwork? Check out the paintings in my Art Shop below:
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Prepping
A few days prior to the planned excursion the guides sent us a packing list: a flashlight (preferably of the headlamp variety) with new batteries, water, candles, a trash bag (to the cataphiles’ credit, they are known for being very respectful of the environment), and snacks - but no glass bottles, too heavy and breakable. Attire-wise, they suggested whatever clothes we don’t mind getting ruined. Rain boots? Not necessarily, at least, not the regular kind - water in the corridors often goes above knee-level, so you would just be stuck in wet boots that won’t dry. Taking the experts’ advice into account, I ended up packing an extra change of everything, including shoes. In hindsight, I may have overpacked - although an extra pair of pants is a must if you plan on taking a taxi home in the end! Being tall and naturally clumsy, I also opted for a climbing helmet with a fitted light - more on that later.
The day before C-Day I figured I should come up with some backup plans for my pets, in case our outing lasts beyond the anticipated 5-6 hours. I gave a spare apartment key to my neighbor, and asked her to come check on Zina (the whippet) and Saathi (the cat) Saturday morning, if I don’t text her that I am back by then. The neighbor asked what she should do if I didn’t turn up later in the day. I started making a list of friends who could potentially babysit my furry family: two for the cat, two more for the dog. One of the four posed a reasonable question of what his responsibilities were, as an emergency cat contact. That prompted some soul-searching on my part. I finally responded with “Make sure she survives until my family gets here,” before noting down my parents’ contact info, as well as the names and phone numbers of the people I was going down to the catacombs with.
Clearly my preparation has taken a turn for the morbid. I googled what it means to “get one’s affairs in order”. Some of the action points seemed like a bit of an overkill and/or required an appointment with a notary, which I certainly wouldn’t be able to secure while still above ground. Others were easy enough, like making a list of the financial institutions that my assets were held at. Personal finance is an interest that I did not develop until all of France was put under house arrest in March 2020, so this was an easy one to summarize. I wrote down the numbers of my checking, savings, and investment accounts on a sheet of paper, put it inside the folder where I keep my mortgage documents, and told my mom where to find it. Now I was ready for my catacombs adventure!
Down the rabbit (man)hole
At the appointed hour, I got out of a metro station located in one of the central Parisian arrondissements south of the Seine. The time being Friday evening, the streets were almost as busy as the cafe terraces lining them up. I walked towards the meeting point that our guides sent while I was still on the metro: a little patch of green just off one of the main streets, a fenced off mini-square, of the kind that you often see in that part of Paris. As I stood across the road, I saw a tall sporty guy around my age sitting on one of the benches, and two younger looking kids chatting on a bench nearby. The pair hopped over to the guy and asked him something that I was not yet close enough to hear. He shrugged in an indeterminate way and said something about the group already being 10 people. The kids nodded and disappeared back onto the street, just as I approached.
- Are you one of ***’s friends? - the tall guy asked me in french.
- I am Olga, a friend of J’s [I will be referring to a few people by their initials from now on]. And you are RC? - I figured he could have been the guide who shared the meeting spot, since he was the first to arrive.
- Yes! How do you know J?
- Erm, Tinder?.. - I said sheepishly.
RC gave out an amused half-snort and asked if I had brought a flashlight.
- Yep, it’s already on my helmet.
- And… You plan on wearing it?
- Definitely! Why, something wrong with a helmet? - I stared back with wide-eyed naivete.
- Only that it will tell everyone down there that you are a tourist.
- Trust me, that will be painfully obvious regardless of what’s on my head.
RC chuckled as a couple of the other explorers-to-be walked into the square. In J’s words, our group was made up of “the French plus one well-integrated Chinese, so do not expect people to be on time”. Indeed, by the time everyone arrived, it was a quarter to 10 pm (21:45 for my European audience, or 45 minutes after our planned starting time). Spring days are long here in Paris, so the sun had just set down. RC and the other, equally tall and sporty cataphile guide PP, said it was time to go down - quickly and in groups of three. Next thing I knew, the cataphiles lifted a rectangular manhole plate just outside the mini-square’s fence (“That’s where those muscles must come from,” - I thought to myself). One by one, people started disappearing into the hole in the pavement while the cars continued to drive by. As I got ready to be next, I listened to PP saying that being the last to descend is the tricky bit, as one has to close the heavy plate with one arm, while holding on to the railing with the other. Some of the entrances into the catacombs start with a 20 meter climb down the rails, and apparently there have been cases of people falling down to a broken spine. “It is harder with the circular plates, - reassured PP. - Worst thing I’ve seen happen with these dual-triangular ones was a guy who got a few of his fingers snapped off when closing up… Also, it’s only 4 meters down here.”
Oddly semi-comforted, I started to climb down and soon felt my feet touch the floor. Most of the others were already standing around the seemingly endless underground gallery, illuminated by nothing but our headlamps. One of the walls was equipped with long metallic supports holding up what looked to be inch-thick communication cables:
Like this illustration? Bring it home!
Once PP closed the lid behind him and climbed down to complete our group of urbexers-to-be, RC announced that we had to get moving. The technical gallery was merely a way in, and getting caught by the police before we even made it to the actual catacombs would have been disappointing. As we jogged along the cable lines, I looked at my phone: the signal was already gone, so I turned on the in-flight mode to conserve the battery in case I ended up needing an extra torch.
After some time we reached a narrow hole at the bottom of the gallery’s wall. If it was not for RC’s stopping, I would not have thought much of it, but our guide clearly intended to crawl into the opening. Nearly 5’10 and sized proportionally, I am quite a bit larger than an average french person, but I figured that if the cataphile’s broad shoulders could go through, so could my butt. And so it did - I had to push my backpack through first, and crawl on my belly, until I finally fell out into the corridor that clearly predated the gallery that we entered from by several centuries. Ladies and gentlemen, we were not in Kansas anymore: welcome to the catacombs.
Like this illustration? Bring it home!
Maze running
Our journey through the ancient quarries started the way most of life’s fun things do: with a safety briefing. RC was to head the group, whereas PP was designated “la fin” - “the end”, i.e. the last person of the column. The catacomb tunnels had a much lower clearance than the technical gallery - the ceiling height varied, but, since I could not stand up straight in most places, I would guesstimate that most corridors were under 1.75 meters (including some long stretches that were only 1.5 meters high or less). Since the helmet added a few centimeters to my already substantial height, this meant that I had to alternate between hunching, crouching, and basically performing walking squats for the next several hours.
There were many spots where large chunks of limestone were hanging down from the ceiling: the first person to notice one was to yell “Tête!” (“Head!”) to alert the others. Similar signals were given to call attention to the presence of holes in the ground, obstacles in the path, pools of water, and slippery stones. Since the group tended to stretch out as we made our way through the maze, in order for the cue to propagate through the column each of us would hear it from whoever was walking in front, and yell it out once again when he or she reached the danger zone themselves. Same thing was done at the intersections: we would yell out “right”, “left”, or “straight”, or wait for the rest of the group to catch up if the intersection was the meeting point of more than four streets. Did I say streets? Yep, I did. Although it is hard to think of the narrow claustrophobia-inducing corridors as the equivalent of wide Parisian avenues and quaint tree-lined rues, many of the underground passages were actually built to follow their surface counterparts. That’s why here and there we would come across a street name chiseled out on the stone wall. Cataphiles use these to orient themselves inside the catacombs, but be warned: the carvings date back to the XIX century, and many of the streets’ names have changed since then!
Like this illustration? The original is no longer available, but the prints are up for sale on Saatchi Art!
We had a lot of ground to cover in the night, so RC picked up a fast pace at the front of the group. Whenever we were going through areas with a higher clearance and fewer obstructions on the ground, we would basically run, and then catch our breath when we had to crawl or balance on the stones to avoid stepping into water-filled holes (a precaution that, frankly, you might as well throw to the wind from the start and just accept that your feet will get soaked). This was all rather physically intense, and the weight of my backpack was starting to feel doubled. On the bright side, I was certainly feeling warmed up, despite the catacombs being a little chilly: the temperature down there remains a constant 12°C (about 54°F) throughout the year. One of the guides, RC or PP, brought a portable speaker, and was blasting music at full volume as we were making our way through the corridors. I have had my fair share of unusual experiences in life, but I have to say, running in a pitch-black maze, dug out centuries ago, to the sounds of a techno mix, following a dim light that would disappear whenever the person in front of me took a turn, all twenty meters below a bustling European capital, definitely makes my current top 10.
Just as I was musing about the peculiarities of life, I heard a strangely familiar sound cutting through the electronic beat.
