Vaugirard Cemetery

The Vaugirard Cemetery stands at three hundred twenty Rue Lecourbe as one of the oldest active burial grounds in all of Paris. While many of the city's famous cemeteries were built to centralize burials in the nineteenth century, this site traces its origins back to seventeen eighty-seven. It began its life serving the residents of what was then the independent commune of Vaugirard, long before the area was absorbed into the city of Paris. Across its modest one and a half hectares, the cemetery holds about two thousand five hundred tombs and nearly one hundred trees representing seventeen different species. These leafy paths create a quiet contrast to the busy urban streets of the fifteenth arrondissement. When you enter, you are walking through a space that has functioned as a local sanctuary for over two hundred years, housing generations of families and soldiers in a dense, historic landscape.