Pére Lachaise cemetery

Today I will take you in a trip in a place where I want to go, so we will both go for the first time.

We will travel in Paris and we will visit the largest cemetery in Paris ( 44Ha). Is one of the most famous cemeteries. Famous people are buried here, like Oscar Wilde, Honoré de Balzac, Georges Bizet, Maria Callas, Eugene Delacroix, Edith Piaf, Moliere, Marcel Proust, Jim Morrison and many others.

The nice part of Pére Lachaise is that you can visit not just by going to Paris, you can also visit the cemetery on an online tour.You just need to go to this link: http://www.pere-lachaise.com/perelachaise.php?lang=en

Now let’s make a tour of the history of Pére Lachaise. First of all the cemetery has this name after the conffessour of king Louis XIV, Pere François de la Chaise (1624-1709), he lived in a Jesuit house rebuilt during the 1682 on the site of the chapel. The property was bought by the city during 1804 and it was established by Napoleon as a cemetery in the same year, it was laid out by Alexandre- Théodore Brongniart and later extended.

Pére Lachaise was open on 21 May 1804, the first person that was buried was a five years little girl named Adélaide Paillard de Villeneuve, the daughter of the door bell-boy of the Faubourg St. Antoine. Her grave no longer exist today as it was a temporary concession.

Napoleon considered that ‘ Every citizen has the right to be buried regrades of race or origin’

At the beginning not many wanted to be buried in this cemetery, the main reason was because the place wasn’t blessed by the Church but also because it was far from the city. In the first year were just 13 tombs but things changed when there was organized the transfer of the remains of Jean de la Fountain and Moliere. The number of graves started to grew, there were 49 in 1806, in 1812 there were 833 graves. The strategy of bringing famous people to be buried in the cemetery worked and the number of graves increased in 1830 were 33000. Pere Lachaise was expanded several times during 1824, 1829, 1832, 1842 and 1850. In the present there are more than 1 million bodies buried and many more in the columbarium which holds the remains of those who requested cremation.

Aux Morts ossuary – the place where lies the bones of Parisians from all the cemeteries from Paris, a modern catacomb that unfortunately most of time is closed for the public.

In 28 May 1871, 147 people were shot here on the foot of this wall and thrown in an open trench, they were combatants of the Paris commune. Here you can read more about it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communards%27_Wall