A municipal ossuary in worked-out limestone quarries about 20 metres under the 14th arrondissement, holding the remains of an estimated six million Parisians moved here from closed cemeteries from 1785 onwards. The visit is 1.5 km one way, 131 steps down and 112 steps up, at a steady 14 °C. The real obstacle is not the walk but the ticket: entry is by timed slot only, no more than 200 people may be underground at once, and the official shop releases each day's slots exactly seven days in advance. Since the site reopened on 8 April 2026 after a five-month refit, the €31 adult ticket includes a headphone audio guide – while resellers who still have slots charge anything from €38 to $169 for the same 1.5 km.
- TicketsSlots go on sale exactly seven days before the day of the visit – before that the official shop (billetterie-parismusees.paris.fr) shows nothing at all, which is not the same as the site being closed.
- Price31 € (about $35.53) – Adult, audio guide included
- OpenTuesday to Sunday 9.45 a.m. to 8.30 p.m., last admission 7.30 p.m.
- Best timeThe first slot of the day, 9.45 a.m. from Tuesday to Thursday, is the quietest; the evening slots after 6 p.m. work too, once the day-trippers have gone.
- ClaustrophobiaThe operator advises people with claustrophobia not to go.
Tickets and prices
Slots go on sale exactly seven days before the day of the visit – before that the official shop (billetterie-parismusees.paris.fr) shows nothing at all, which is not the same as the site being closed. If you need a particular day, be at the screen that morning one week ahead.
Official prices
- Adult, audio guide included31 € (about $35.53)
- Reduced (18–26, students, teachers and others), audio guide included25 € (about $28.65)
- Children and teenagers 8–17, audio guide included15 € (about $17.19)
- Children 0–7 (without audio guide)free
- Audio guide on its own, for free-entry visitors, bought at the desk5 € (about $5.73)
As of 09/2026 · source and direct booking: catacombes.paris.fr/en
When everything is sold out
With 200 people allowed underground at a time, weekends, school holidays and late-morning slots go quickly. When the official shop is empty, the resellers named on catacombes.paris.fr (GetYourGuide, Tiqets, Headout, Klook, The Tour Guy, Walks and around fifteen others) sometimes still have stock – at a markup. A snapshot taken on 20 September 2026: catacombes-paris.com sells a self-guided entry from €38 (about $43.55) against the operator's €31, skiptheline.tickets advertises a special-access guided tour from €119 (about $136.37) and a “secret rooms” tour from €150 (about $171.90), and Walks/WalksDevour asks $169 a head for two hours with a guide. That is roughly five times the official price for the same 1.5 km of tunnel, with a guide and a couple of gated side rooms as the difference.
Tickets and guided tours for the Paris Catacombs
Book direct if you possibly can: the operator charges €31 (about $35.53) including the headphone audio guide, and slots for a given day appear at billetterie-parismusees.paris.fr exactly seven days beforehand. A reseller earns its keep in one case only – when those slots are gone, or when you need a date further out than a week. It costs you: plain entry resold starts around €38 (about $43.55), and guided tours with access to a few gated side rooms run from €119 to $169 a head, roughly five times the official price for the same 1.5 km of tunnel. Check the description for whether admission is actually included, and remember that no ticket at any price skips the bag check at the door.
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Booked through GetYourGuide (affiliate link, advertising). Most offers can be cancelled free of charge up to 24 hours ahead. Prices as of 20 September 2026.
Opening hours and best time
Tuesday to Sunday 9.45 a.m. to 8.30 p.m., last admission 7.30 p.m. Closed Mondays and on 1 January, 1 May and 25 December; open on 14 July, 15 August, 1 November and 11 November. Status on 20 September 2026: open as normal. The site was shut completely from 3 November 2025 to 7 April 2026 while the electrics, ventilation, fire protection and lighting were renewed, and reopened on 8 April 2026. No further closure is announced on the official site.
When it is quietest
The first slot of the day, 9.45 a.m. from Tuesday to Thursday, is the quietest; the evening slots after 6 p.m. work too, once the day-trippers have gone. Because the number below ground is capped, the season decides very little and the ticket decides everything: in school holidays and at weekends, book exactly seven days ahead, in the morning. The constant 14 °C makes this one of the better things to do in a Paris heatwave or a wet afternoon.
Who it suits
With children
Allowed; under-14s must be with an adult. Whether a child copes with thousands of skulls, low light and narrow galleries is a judgement for the parents – for small or nervous children it is usually too much. Under-8s go free.
Minimum age
No minimum age. Children under 14 must be accompanied by an adult.
Wheelchair
Not accessible. There are stairs only – 131 steps down, 112 up – and no lift. The operator also advises against the visit for anyone with limited mobility or a heart or respiratory condition.
Pushchair
In practice impossible: spiral staircases, no cloakroom and nowhere to leave anything. Strollers are among the items turned away, and no bag larger than 40 × 30 cm is allowed in.
Dogs
No animals, with the exception of assistance and guide dogs. White canes are not permitted below ground, so visually impaired visitors need a companion.
Claustrophobia
The operator advises people with claustrophobia not to go. The galleries are low and narrow, the light is dim and the route is a 1.5 km one-way passage with no short cut back to the surface.
What to wear
A steady 14 °C and high humidity all year – take a light jacket even in August. Closed, grippy shoes: the floor is uneven, gravelly and wet in places.
Photography
Hand-held photography is allowed; tripods are not, and neither are motorcycle helmets or large bags. Do not touch the bones or the masonry, and no eating, drinking or smoking below ground.
Getting there
By public transport
Métro lines 4 and 6 and RER B to Denfert-Rochereau; the entrance pavilion stands on the square itself, beside the Lion of Belfort. Buses 38 and 68, and a Vélib' station on Avenue René-Coty. A single metro-train-RER ticket costs €2.55 (about $2.92) in 2026.
By car
No car park of its own; the nearest paying garage is on Boulevard Saint-Jacques. Driving in central Paris is not worth it – the whole district is paid parking and the low-emission zone applies.
From the nearest city
From Châtelet in the centre, 10 to 15 minutes on métro 4 or RER B with no change. From Charles de Gaulle airport, RER B runs from both terminal stations straight through to Denfert-Rochereau without a change; allow about 45 minutes, and buy the Paris Region–Airports ticket at €14 (about $16.04), because the ordinary €2.55 ticket is not valid to or from the airports. From Orly, métro line 14 has run into the airport since 2024: take it to Châtelet and change to line 4, or use Orlyval to Antony and RER B; the airport ticket is €14 here too. From the Eurostar and international trains at Gare du Nord, RER B is direct, six stops. Note that you do not come out where you went in: the exit is about 700 m south at 21 bis Avenue René-Coty, nearest stations Denfert-Rochereau again or Mouton-Duvernet on line 4 – arrange to meet anyone who is not coming down there rather than at the entrance.
Tips for your visit
- Set an alarm. Slots appear in the official shop seven days before the date you want and not a minute earlier; finding nothing on sale does not mean the Catacombs are shut.
- Book through catacombes.paris.fr or billetterie-parismusees.paris.fr, or through one of the resellers listed on the official site. Fake tickets circulate online and outside the entrance.
- Travel light. Bags must measure under 40 × 30 cm and be carried in front of you. There is no cloakroom and no locker – leave luggage at the hotel or at the station.
- The toilets are at the entrance and at the exit, nowhere in between. Use them before you go down.
- Take a jacket and proper shoes: 14 °C, damp uneven ground and 243 steps in total.
- Plan the way back. You surface about 700 m from where you started, at 21 bis Avenue René-Coty.
- The operator allows 45 minutes; the new audio guide runs about an hour, so with photo stops reckon on 60 to 75 minutes below ground.
- If you are entitled to free entry – a disability card with a companion, for instance – go straight to the desk with your proof. The operator guarantees admission even when the website is sold out.
What the internet gets wrong
The six million is an estimate of the remains moved in from cemeteries between 1785 and the 1860s, not a count, and there is not one articulated skeleton down there. The bones were sorted by type: what lines the route are facing walls of femurs and skulls, with everything else tipped in loose behind them and piled towards the roof. The ossuary covers about 11,000 m², the walk is 1.5 km, and Sortiraparis puts the bone-lined stretch of it at roughly 800 m. You see a wall, not six million people.
That price band no longer exists. The official 2026 rates are €31 (about $35.53) full, €25 (about $28.65) reduced for 18–26s and students, €15 (about $17.19) for 8- to 17-year-olds, and free under 8 – audio guide included in every paid ticket.
The €15 is the children's rate, and no adult pays €50 for an audio guide. The official adult ticket is €31 and has included the headphone audio guide since April 2026. The €5 audio-guide charge applies only to visitors who got in free.
the quarry network under Paris is roughly 300 km by French sources, 280 km by English Wikipedia, and it is not the ossuary. The visitor route is 1.5 km, not 2, and everything beyond it has been closed by prefectural order since 2 November 1955. The cataphiles who go in anyway are breaking that order: a police unit nicknamed the cataflics patrols the quarries and the fine is €60, about $68.76.
Nobody was ever buried here. These are quarries, and what arrived from 1785 were bones already decades or centuries old, moved out of cemeteries that were being closed on public-health grounds. Some of those remains will have come from plague-era mass graves at Les Innocents, but no epidemic burial was ever made underground and the ossuary is not a grave.
the only legal way in is the pavilion at 1 Avenue du Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy. Manholes, vent shafts and metro-tunnel holes are unofficial access points, the city keeps sealing them, and being found in the closed quarries costs €60 (about $68.76) plus whatever the unlit, flood-prone galleries cost you. Even the ticket resellers say so: paristickets.com calls these entries “illegal, unsafe, and closed to the public”.
The hours-long queue belongs to the era before compulsory timed tickets. Everybody now arrives at a booked time, and no ticket at any price gets you past the door check on bag size and contents. What a reseller sells is the same slot the operator sells at €31, sometimes with a guide attached – the scarce thing is availability, not speed.
The 112 steps are right, the address is eight years out of date. The exit moved in 2017 and is now 21 bis Avenue René-Coty, about 700 m from the entrance.
History in brief
- The galleries are worked-out limestone quarries that supplied building stone for Paris for centuries; the whole quarry network under the city is put at roughly 300 km, of which the museum shows 1.5 km.
- The ossuary was a public-health measure. The inner-city burial grounds, above all the Cimetière des Innocents, were so overloaded that they were fouling the surrounding wells; from 1785 the bones were carted to the quarries at night, in processions.
- The site was consecrated on 7 April 1786, and transfers from further Paris cemeteries went on into the 19th century.
- The remains of an estimated six million people lie here across about 11,000 m² of ossuary.
- Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury, inspector general of the quarries, had the bones stacked into the walls of skulls, femurs and tibias you see today in 1810/11 and organised regular visits from 1809.
- In August 1944 the command post of the Paris Resistance under Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy sat in a bunker under Place Denfert-Rochereau; the entrance address is named after him.
- Electric light reached the route in 1983, administration passed to the Musée Carnavalet in 2002, and the exit moved from Rue Rémy-Dumoncel to 21 bis Avenue René-Coty in 2017.
- From 3 November 2025 to 7 April 2026 the whole technical fit-out was renewed – wiring, ventilation with temperature, CO₂ and humidity monitoring, fire protection and lighting – along with a new route with display elements and the restored dry-stone wall in front of the victims of the September Massacres.
Frequent questions
How much do tickets to the Paris Catacombs cost in 2026?
The adult ticket is €31, about $35.53, with the audio guide included. It is €25 (about $28.65) for 18- to 26-year-olds and students, €15 (about $17.19) for ages 8 to 17, and free under 8. Dollar figures use the European Central Bank reference rate of 18 September 2026, €1 = $1.1460. Resellers charge more, from €38 for plain entry to $169 for a guided tour.
How far in advance can you book the Paris Catacombs?
Seven days, and no further. The Paris Musées shop opens each day's timed slots exactly one week beforehand, so there is nothing to buy a month out. Only resellers sell earlier dates, out of their own allocations and at a markup. For a weekend or a school holiday, be online on the morning exactly seven days ahead.
Can you visit the Paris Catacombs without a ticket booked online?
Not reliably. The official site sells only free entitlement tickets at the desk – for under-8s, disabled visitors and their companion, job seekers and journalists, on production of proof, and those are guaranteed even when the website is sold out. Paid walk-up tickets are not advertised; travel sites report that they stopped with the 2026 reopening, though Secrets of Paris says the odd same-day slot surfaces in low season.
How long does the Paris Catacombs visit take?
The operator allows 45 minutes for the 1.5 km route. The new audio guide runs about an hour, so if you listen to it all and stop for photographs, plan 60 to 75 minutes underground, plus the security and ticket check at the door.
How many steps are there in the Paris Catacombs?
131 steps down at the start and 112 up at the end, 243 in all, on spiral staircases. There is no lift, which is why the site is not wheelchair accessible and why the operator advises against the visit for anyone with a heart or respiratory condition.
Is the Paris Catacombs worth it?
If you are interested in the city's history and can handle dark, narrow, low galleries, it is one of the strangest hours in Paris and far better lit and explained since the 2026 refit. At €31 it is also one of the dearer tickets in the city, the walk is a one-way 1.5 km with 243 steps, and it is the wrong outing for anyone with claustrophobia or bad knees.
Can you visit the Catacombs without a guided tour?
Yes. The standard visit is self-guided and no tour is compulsory. Every paid ticket now includes a headphone audio guide in French, English, Spanish or German, with about 20 segments that start automatically on the route, and the new display panels are in French, English and Spanish. A guided tour buys you a guide, not access.
How many bodies are in the Paris Catacombs, and do you see them all?
The accepted estimate is about six million people, spread over roughly 11,000 m² of ossuary. You do not see them: the bones were sorted, and what lines the route are stacked walls of femurs and skulls with the rest piled in behind. The bone-lined part of the walk is around 800 m of the 1.5 km.
Can you explore the 300 km of tunnels under Paris?
No. The quarry network is separate from the ossuary and has been off limits since a prefectural order of 2 November 1955. A dedicated police unit patrols it, entrances get sealed, and being caught carries a €60 fine, about $68.76. No legal tour goes beyond the museum route; offers promising secret rooms stay inside the official site.
Are the Paris Catacombs suitable for children?
They are not forbidden – under-14s simply have to be with an adult, and under-8s go free – but the route passes millions of human bones in dim light and it is long, cold and enclosed. For small or anxious children it is often too much. Strollers cannot be taken down the spiral stairs and there is nowhere to leave one.
How cold is it in the Catacombs and what should I wear?
About 14 °C all year, with high humidity, so a light jacket makes sense even in August. Wear closed shoes with grip: the floor is gravelly, uneven and wet in places. Bags must be smaller than 40 × 30 cm and carried in front of you, and there is no cloakroom.
Where do the Paris Catacombs start and where do you come out?
You go in at the pavilion at 1 Avenue du Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy on Place Denfert-Rochereau, served by métro 4 and 6 and RER B. You come out about 700 m away at 21 bis Avenue René-Coty – the route is one way, so there is no going back for anything you left at the entrance.
Can you take photographs in the Paris Catacombs?
Hand-held photography is allowed. Tripods are banned, as are large bags and motorcycle helmets, and touching the bones or the masonry is not permitted. Eating, drinking and smoking are forbidden below ground.
Sources
Show 23 sources – every figure on this page is sourced
- www.catacombes.paris.fr/en/visit/useful-information – Opening hours, closing days, entrance and exit addresses, 131/112 steps, 14 °C, 1.5 km, 45 minutes, maximum 200 visitors, accompaniment rule under 14, bag rules, audio guide languages, accessibility, getting there
- www.catacombes.paris.fr/en/visit/individual-rates – 2026 prices €31/€25/€15, free under 8, €5 audio guide, free tickets only at the desk with guaranteed admission, list of authorised resellers
- www.catacombes.paris.fr/visiter/tarifs-individuels – Booking opens seven days ahead, reduced rate for 18–26, warning about counterfeit tickets
- www.catacombes.paris.fr/en/news – Closure from 3 November 2025, scope of the works, new headphone audio guide
- www.paris.fr/en/pages/the-catacombs-of-paris-reopen-to-the-publ… – Reopening on 8 April 2026, renewed technical fit-out, new route, just under 600,000 visitors a year
- www.offi.fr/tendances/a-travers-paris/les-catacombes-de-paris-r… – Reopening, audio guide in four languages with about 20 automatically triggered sequences, seven-day booking window
- secretsofparis.com/sightseeing/museums-monuments/how-to-avoid-l… – English-language report after the reopening: prices 31/25/15, seven-day maximum booking window, possible last-minute tickets in low season, new audio guide with music, panels in three languages, no cloakroom
- fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacombes_de_Paris – History (1785/1786, 1809, 1810/11, 1983, 2002), about 6 million dead, 20 m depth, 11,000 m², roughly 300 km of quarries, exit in Rue Rémy-Dumoncel until 2017, visitor numbers 2025
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacombs_of_Paris – English reference for the six-million estimate and for Héricart de Thury's stacking of skulls, femurs and tibias with the remaining bones placed behind the walls
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataphile – Access without escort illegal since 2 November 1955, €60 fine, police patrol nicknamed cataflics, network given as about 280 km
- www.sortiraparis.com/en/what-to-visit-in-paris/history-heritage… – Nearly 300 km of galleries under Paris intra-muros, 1955 prefectural order, cataflic brigade, visitor route 1.5 km of which about 800 m is ossuary
- www.thetravel.com/what-paris-caracombs-are-like/ – Source for the claim that locals enter through secret entrances; also gives the €60 ($65) fine and names the E.R.I.C. police unit
- thebettervacation.com/paris/paris-catacombs-tour/ – Source for the outdated child price of €12 for ages 5–17 and for the claim of 320 km of tunnels; also states that bags are checked by security staff
- www.nomadicmatt.com/travel-blogs/catacombs-of-paris/ – Source for the claims that the tour area is 2 km long, that the network runs to 320 km and that the queue gets to be hours long
- thedarkatlas.com/posts/paris-catacombs-france – Source for the claims of artfully arranged skeletal remains of over six million Parisians and that many of the bones belong to victims of the plague
- skiptheline.tickets/france/paris/catacombs/ – Source for the claims that official timed entry costs about €15 and entry with audio guide starts at €50; special-access tour from €119, secret rooms tour from €150
- catacombes-paris.com/en/paris-catacombs-tickets-prices/ – Reseller price of about €38 for self-guided entry and €139 for a guided tour with restricted access; source for the outdated exit address 36 Rue Rémy Dumoncel; confirms the 200-visitor cap and the seven-day release
- www.walksdevour.com/paris/tours/paris-catacombs-tour/ – Reseller price of $169 per person for a two-hour tour with special access, and the claim of skipping the entrance line
- www.paristickets.com/catacombs/entrances/ – Entrance and exit addresses, about 700 m apart, and the warning that unofficial entrances used by cataphiles are illegal, unsafe and closed to the public
- www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref-daily.xml – ECB euro reference rate of 18 September 2026: €1 = $1.1460 – the basis for every dollar figure on this page
- open.er-api.com/v6/latest/EUR – Cross-check: €1 = $1.1477 on 20 September 2026
- freewalkingtour.com/blog/public-transport-in-paris-2026-2027-wh… – 2026 fares: single metro-train-RER ticket €2.55, Paris Region–Airports ticket €14 for CDG by RER B and for Orly by métro 14
- www.european-traveler.com/france/cheap-rer-line-b-train-to-pari… – Confirms the €14 Paris Region–Airports ticket for 2026 and gives RER B journey times of roughly 30 minutes into central Paris