Cimetière parisien de Pantin

You are approaching the Cimetière parisien de Pantin, the largest active cemetery in all of France. When Paris faced a critical shortage of burial space in the late nineteenth century, the city administration began building these massive necropolises outside its own borders. Opened in eighteen eighty-six, this site spans over one hundred hectares and functions like a small, silent city. It features a rigid urban grid of straight, numbered avenues that stretch for twenty miles, designed to accommodate the thousands of burials that have taken place here annually for over a century.