Paris Père Lachaise Cemetery Famous Graves & Legends Guided Tour (Small Group, Max 15)

Hear the story of Père Lachaise,
the largest cemetery in Paris

Meet your guide outside Chaize Coffee Shop on Boulevard de Ménilmontant and enter Père Lachaise Cemetery. Covering 44 hectares with more than 70,000 graves and over 3 million visitors a year, it is explored by small groups of 15 or fewer who climb the hill along cobbled paths. The tour lasts about 2 hours.

Opened in 1804 by decree of Napoleon and designed by Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart as an English landscape garden, the cemetery was at first shunned because it was too far from the city. Hear how it became the most sought-after cemetery in Europe after the remains of Molière, La Fontaine, Héloïse and Abélard were moved here in 1817.

Visit famous graves, from Jim Morrison to Chopin

At Jim Morrison's grave, the most visited in the cemetery, hear about the summer of 1971, the Greek inscription and the pilgrims who still come today. See Frédéric Chopin's grave watched over by a weeping muse, and Oscar Wilde's winged sphinx by Jacob Epstein, along with the scandal it caused and the glass barrier added in 2011. Pay your respects at Édith Piaf's family grave and admire remarkable sculpted monuments such as those of Victor Noir and Fernand Arbelot.

Read the architecture and symbols of the cemetery

Neo-Gothic chapels, Egyptian Revival obelisks, Haussmann-era family tombs, Art Nouveau ironwork and Art Deco slabs stand within a few hundred meters of each other. Your guide explains symbols such as inverted torches, broken columns, veiled urns and Masonic emblems, and you pause in the upper section to take in the rooftops of Paris.

Discover the cemetery's dark history and legends

At the dolmen tomb of Allan Kardec, founder of Spiritism, hear how 19th-century Paris became obsessed with the dead and why his grave is still the most flower-covered in the cemetery. At the Communards' Wall, learn what happened to the last defenders of the Paris Commune in May 1871, and under the Byzantine dome of the Columbarium, hear the stories visitors have told over the decades. These stories are local accounts rather than facts.

※ The tour ends at the Gambetta gate next to the metro station.
※ As Père Lachaise is an active cemetery where funerals take place, the tour is conducted quietly and respectfully throughout.