How to visit Père Lachaise

Which métro station, and why it matters

Père Lachaise sits on a hill. The main gate on boulevard de Ménilmontant is at the bottom of it, and the Gambetta gate is at the top, about thirty metres higher. Choosing a station is therefore choosing whether to spend your visit climbing or descending, and almost everybody gets this wrong.

Philippe Auguste (line 2) is the closest station to the main gate — a minute's walk, and the quietest exit of the three. Père Lachaise (lines 2 and 3) is two minutes away and is what most people use, so the pavement outside it is the most crowded. Both put you at the bottom.

Gambetta (lines 3 and 3bis) puts you at the top. It is five minutes from the station to the Porte Gambetta along rue des Rondeaux, and from there the entire cemetery is downhill. If you are going to see Oscar Wilde, Proust, Gertrude Stein or Édith Piaf, all of whom are in the upper divisions, this is the only sensible way in.

Alexandre Dumas (line 2) is about seven minutes from the Porte de la Réunion on the eastern side, which is useful for the Mur des Fédérés and almost nothing else. Note that this gate is closed for works between 26 March and 19 April.

Buses 26, 60, 61, 64, 69, 71, 76 all stop within a few minutes of one gate or another. By taxi, give the street address of the gate you want, not the name of the cemetery — "Père Lachaise" will get you to the main gate every time.

What the ground is actually like

The City of Paris describes the going here as cheminements en pavés anciens ou en terre, irréguliers, très étroits — old cobbles or packed earth, irregular, and in places very narrow. That is an accurate description and it is worth taking literally.

The main avenues are surfaced and wide, and you can walk them in almost anything. The moment you step off them to reach an individual grave, you are on nineteenth-century cobbles that have been lifted by tree roots for two hundred years, or on bare earth that turns to mud in the rain. There are frequent short flights of steps between terraces, and no handrails on most of them.

Wear shoes with a sole. Trainers or walking shoes are right; sandals and smooth-soled boots are not, and heels are a genuinely bad idea. In wet weather the cobbles in the shaded upper divisions stay slippery for a long time after the rain stops.

There is no seating along most routes, no shelter, no café, no shop, no water fountain that you should rely on, and public toilets only near the main entrance. Bring water. Do not bring a picnic — eating is not permitted.

If you have limited mobility

Be honest with yourself about this one, because the site is not going to make allowances. Père Lachaise is partly accessible and no more than that.

The surfaced main avenues — the avenue Principale from the main gate, the avenue Circulaire around the perimeter — are manageable with a stick, and a companion-pushed wheelchair can use them. What they cannot do is reach most individual graves, which sit off the avenues on cobbles or earth.

The gradients are real. From the boulevard to the Gambetta gate is a sustained climb; doing it the other way round removes most of the difficulty, which is the single most useful piece of advice on this page.

Two gates are unusable if you cannot manage steps: the Porte des Amandiers and the Porte de la Réunion. The main gate, the Porte du Repos and the Porte Gambetta are all step-free.

If you want to come but need the route planned around what you can actually do, a private walk can be routed along the avenues, and we will send you the route in writing — naming the graves it reaches and the ones it does not — before you commit to anything.

What to bring

A plan. Free paper plans are available from the conservation office at 16 rue du Repos, open on weekdays. They mark the principal graves by division and they are considerably more useful than a phone, because the tree cover here plays havoc with GPS and you will lose your signal in the upper divisions.

Division numbers, written down. The cemetery is signed by division, not by name. Knowing that Chopin is in 11 and Piaf is in 97 turns a forty-minute search into a five-minute walk. Our index lists the division for everyone.

Water, and layers. It is exposed at the top and cold in the shade at the bottom, and there is nowhere inside to buy anything.

Flowers, if you are visiting someone. They are welcome. Food, drink, candles and anything that has to be cleared away afterwards are not.

How to behave

This is the part that separates a good visitor from a bad one, and it comes down to a single fact: Père-Lachaise holds around around 10,000 funeral ceremonies a year. On any given weekday morning, somebody is being buried here. You may well walk past it.

If you do, stop talking, step off the path, and wait. Do not photograph it. Do not walk through the edge of it because your route goes that way. This is the one rule that actually matters and it is not negotiable.

Beyond that: do not stand or sit on graves, including the ones nobody has visited in a century — a grave you think is abandoned may not be. Do not leave objects on a grave that is not yours; the staff have to remove them and some of them damage the stone. Do not add to graffiti anywhere. Keep your voice down, and your phone on silent.

Picnics, bicycles, scooters, running, drones and dogs other than assistance dogs are all prohibited by the City of Paris. Photography for your own use is fine; a tripod, a drone or a commercial shoot needs permission from the cemetery administration.

And one that visitors get wrong constantly: do not touch the monuments. The lipstick on Oscar Wilde's tomb ate through the stone until a glass wall had to be built around it. Bronze that gets rubbed loses its patina permanently. Nineteenth-century limestone does not recover.

How long to allow

One hour gets you the lower divisions: Héloïse and Abélard, Chopin, Molière and La Fontaine and Jim Morrison, all within about ten minutes of the main gate. It is a good hour and a perfectly respectable visit.

Two to three hours gets you the shape of the whole cemetery, entering at Gambetta and walking down. That is what our guided walk does, and it is also what our free written route does if you would rather be alone.

Half a day and you can wander, which is honestly the best way to experience the place — the sculpture in the anonymous divisions is often better than the sculpture over the famous names.

Nobody sees all of it. Forty-four hectares, fifteen kilometres of paths, and somewhere over a million people buried since 1804. Come back.