Cimetière de Pantin - Porte Diderot

The Cimetière parisien de Pantin, inaugurated in eighteen eighty-six, holds the distinction of being the largest active cemetery in all of France. It was established when Paris was expanding rapidly and local city cemeteries could no longer accommodate the growing population, forcing the city to look beyond its administrative borders to create this vast, hundred-and-seven-hectare necropolis. Unlike the winding, organic paths often found in older, more famous Parisian burial grounds, this site was designed with an exacting, urban grid of long, straight avenues and numbered sections that span more than twice the area of Père-Lachaise. It functions as a massive, quiet city of the dead, home to nearly two hundred thousand graves and roughly eight thousand trees that shade its expansive, thirty-two-kilometer network of roads.