★★★★★ 5.0
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Montparnasse Cemetery
This cemetery runs BACKWARDS through time! Built in 1824 on three old farms, it hides a 400-year-old windmill right in its center that lost its spinning blades and became a DANCE HALL before becoming the caretaker's house! Over 300,000 people rest here now - that's like filling your entire school a thousand times over! As you explore, hunt for the famous shared grave where two philosopher lovers chose to be buried together forever. This whole place replaced Paris's most disgusting cemetery where six MILLION rotting bodies were stacked like smelly pancakes until they were moved to the spooky Catacombs underground!
Did You Know?
- Montparnasse Cemetery is home to a 14th or 15th-century windmill—one of the last surviving windmills in Paris—sitting at its western corner, a rare relic from when the area was rural farmland outside the city, long before it became a bustling urban cemetery.
- The cemetery is a veritable open-air museum of funerary art, featuring an eclectic mix of Egyptian, Classical, Gothic, Renaissance, and Art Nouveau monuments, as well as over 1,200 trees, creating a romantic and contemplative atmosphere rarely found in urban cemeteries.
- Montparnasse Cemetery is the final resting place of some of France’s most influential thinkers and artists, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir (who share a grave), sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi (creator of the Statue of Liberty), and singer Serge Gainsbourg, making it a cultural pilgrimage site for lovers of literature, philosophy, and music.