About Père Lachaise Walks

One cemetery

We guide in Père Lachaise and nowhere else. That is a deliberate limit rather than a stage on the way to something bigger. Forty-four hectares, ninety-seven divisions, two hundred and twenty years of Parisian death and about fifteen kilometres of path is more than enough ground for one company to know properly.

The practical effect is that our guides are not reading a script written for six sites. They know which paths flood, which divisions are shut for works this month, where the funeral parties usually gather on a Tuesday morning, and which of the stories in the guidebooks do not survive contact with the records.

What we sell, and what we do not

We sell two things: a scheduled small-group walk capped at twenty people, and a private walk for groups of up to six. That is the entire catalogue.

We do not sell admission, because entry to Père Lachaise is free and always has been. A great deal of the search traffic for this cemetery is people trying to buy a ticket that does not exist, and a great deal of the industry is content to let them keep thinking that. We have written a whole page about it, and the first thing it says is: do not give anyone money to get in.

We also do not sell ghost tours, night tours, séances, or anything that treats this place as a set. People are buried here. Their families visit. Around ten thousand funerals a year take place in the ground we walk through. There is more than enough in the actual history to fill two hours without any of that.

Our guides

Every walk is led by a holder of the French carte professionnelle de guide-conférencier — the state qualification that permits professional guiding in France, and a genuine credential rather than an internal badge.

Individual guide biographies will be published here once the team for the season is confirmed. We would rather leave this section thin than fill it with names and photographs of people who might not be the person who meets you at the gate.

How we decide what goes on this website

Three rules, and they are the reason this site reads differently from most tour-company sites.

Everything is checked. Opening hours, gate closures and access notes come from the City of Paris and carry the date we retrieved them. Division numbers are cross-checked against at least two independent sources — wrong division numbers are the most-repeated error on the English-language web about this cemetery, and getting them right costs visitors nothing and saves them an afternoon.

We say when we do not know. Whether the remains under Molière's sarcophagus are actually his has never been settled; whether Héloïse and Abélard are under their canopy is the same question. Plenty of tours tell those stories straight because the caveat spoils the anecdote. A story that needs protecting from questions is not worth telling.

We do not publish social proof we cannot evidence. There are no review counts, no star ratings and no press logos on this site, because we do not yet have any we could stand behind. When we do, they will appear here with a link to the platform they came from and not before.

When we tell you not to book

Reasonably often, and it is the part of the job we are least embarrassed about.

If you have come to Paris to stand at one grave for ten minutes, look up the division number on our index, walk in at the right gate and go. If you would rather be alone with the place, take our free written route and use it. If you have three days in Paris and a list, spend them somewhere else and come back next time.

A guided walk is worth paying for when you want the connective history rather than a list of graves, when you would otherwise spend forty minutes lost, or when you need the route planned around a mobility limit or a family name. Outside those cases we will say so, and we would rather say so before you pay than after.