7 min read
Père Lachaise Cemetery: the complete 2026 visitor's guide
Free to enter, open every day, and about thirty metres taller at one end than the other. Here is what a visit actually involves this year, in the order you will need it.
The journal
Everything we know about this cemetery that will not fit into two hours of walking: the history, the sculpture, the arguments about who is really buried where, and the practical detail that makes the difference between a good visit and a lost afternoon.
6 min read
The 20 most famous graves at Père Lachaise (and how to find them)
Twenty graves, twenty division numbers, and an order to walk them in that runs downhill from the Gambetta gate to the boulevard without doubling back once.
6 min read
Oscar Wilde's tomb: Epstein's angel, the kisses, and the glass wall
A twenty-tonne block of English limestone, an anonymous donor, a policeman guarding it from public decency, and a hundred years later a wall of glass. The strangest commission in the cemetery.
6 min read
Jim Morrison's grave: what to expect, and the myths that won't die
A flat bronze plaque, a low railing and a great deal of nonsense. What is genuinely worth knowing about division 6, and what to stop repeating.
6 min read
Why Molière's 1817 reburial saved Père Lachaise from failure
A new cemetery outside the walls, thirteen burials in its first year, and an administration with a budget problem. What they did about it worked so well that we are still doing it.
6 min read
The Mur des Fédérés and the last stand of the Paris Commune
A plain stretch of brick at the eastern edge of the cemetery, and the most politically charged twenty metres in Paris. What happened there, and what has happened to it since.
6 min read
A two-hour self-guided walking route through Père Lachaise
Start at the top gate, finish at the métro, and never once walk uphill. Thirteen stops in the order they actually occur on the ground, with the division numbers you will need.
6 min read
Père Lachaise opening hours, gates, and the best time of day to visit
It opens at eight on a weekday and nine on a Sunday, and the difference between arriving at half past eight and half past eleven is the difference between two entirely different places.
6 min read
Reading the stones: a field guide to 19th-century funerary symbolism
Almost every monument in this cemetery is making an argument in a shared visual language that has since been forgotten. Once you can read it, an anonymous tomb becomes the most interesting thing on the path.
Or come and see it
Two hours, downhill from the Gambetta gate, twenty people maximum. Most of what is written here gets told standing in front of the thing it is about.