Paris in July, 2025 - Père Lachaise Cemetery - Travels

Thank you to Emma @ Words and Peace who hosts this fantastic challenge. I continue my sightseeing through Paris by making a visit to the long awaited Père Lachaise cemetery.

I wanted to visit this cemetery for a long time. Many famous people are buried here. It reminds me of another beautiful cemetery, the Highgate Cemetery in London. Père Lachaise is a big park and you can stroll around, sit down here and there on a bench (although I think they could have more opportunities to sit down).

At the entrance I received a map over the most famous people. It is a list of 86 people. Not possible to visit all, but I made a note for the most interesting and started walking. It was a beautiful, sunny day and a perfect place to slowly stroll around. Although you have a map, it is not always easy to find the tombs/graves you are looking for. Many graves are very old, and not cared for, but it gives a certain ambiance to the place.

According to the information on the map, there are nearly 10,000 funerals every year. It is still today a cemetery in use. It was designed by A.T. Brongniart in 1804 and its purpose was to replace unsanitary parish cemeteries. The park is the largest green space in Paris with its 43.20 hectares (4,32 square km). There are 70,000 graves and many commemorative monuments.

Which graves did I visit?

I concentrated on cultural people, that is writers and artists of different kinds.

Honoré de Balzac - Georges Bizet - Anthelme Brillat-Savarin - Jean-Francoise Champollion - Frédéric Chopin - Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette - Eugène Delacroix - Jean de La Fontaine - Michel Legrand - Amedeo Modigliani - Jean-Baptiste Molière - Yves Montand - Jim Morrison - Èdith Piaf - Camille Pissaro - Marcel Proust - Georges Seurat - Simone Signoret - Gertrude Stein - Oscar Wilde

A suitable memorial, an Egyptian obelisk, for Champollion who was the one who deciphered the hieroglyphs.

It might not sound much, but it took around 3-4 hours to stroll around. If you are in Paris I can highly recommend this visit. If not, just for the beauty of the place, the tranquility and the surrounding nature.