communal cemetery of Pantin

The Parisian cemetery of Pantin is the largest active burial ground in all of France. It spans over one hundred hectares, a scale that dwarfs even the most famous cemeteries within the city of Paris. Opened in eighteen eighty-six, the site was created as a direct response to the rapid population growth of the capital, which had long since exhausted the capacity of its intra-muros graveyards. Despite its massive footprint and the more than one million people interred here, it remains a quiet and largely understated space, characterized by a highly organized urban grid of long, straight avenues and over eight thousand trees.