Père Lachaise Cemetery Tours: Famous Graves, Stories and Ghosts

Père Lachaise is the most visited cemetery in Paris, with more than three million visitors a year according to the City of Paris, and you do not need a ticket: the gates are open every day of the year and entry is free. What you pay for on a tour is the route. The cemetery covers 43 hectares of slopes, cobbled avenues and some 70,000 tombs, the signposting is thin, and Jim Morrison’s grave is small and tucked behind others. A guide gets you to the names you came for in two hours and tells you the stories the stones do not.

For most first visits, take the haunted tour above. It is the one most people book (4.6/5 from 4,326 reviews, from $25 as of October 2026), it still covers Morrison and the famous graves, and the ghost stories make the cemetery’s history stick.

Check haunted tour dates

Is it worth a guide?

If you only want two graves, no. Download the City of Paris interactive map, walk in from the main gate and find them yourself. A guide earns its fee when you want more than a checklist: the political history in the stones, the 19th-century funerary symbols, why Molière and La Fontaine were moved here in 1817 to make the new cemetery fashionable, or simply not spending an hour lost among the divisions.

Which tour suits you

The tours differ more in voice than in route. Most pass the big names, and all of them have free cancellation up to 24 hours before.

Prices, ratings and review counts from our October 2026 data check; operators use seasonal pricing, so treat them as the shape of the market, not a quote.

One more suits a narrower taste. The historian-archaeologist tour from Archeocultura (from $23, 5.0/5 from 59 reviews) reads the symbols on the tombs and leaves the main paths; it is in the comparison above. You may see escape games and treasure hunts at Père Lachaise sold online. The City of Paris forbids organised games in the cemetery (its rules name trails, treasure hunts and escape games), so none is listed here.

Where the famous graves are

Père Lachaise is divided into numbered divisions, marked on the City of Paris map and on small signs at the path corners. The ones people ask for most:

For every famous grave on one map, with its division and the way to find it, the Père Lachaise famous-graves guide at pere-lachaise-tour.com goes grave by grave.

Morrison and Chopin sit near the lower, western end, so start there from the main gate. Wilde, Piaf and the Mur des Fédérés are a long uphill walk to the east. If you have one hour, do the west; if you have two, cross the whole cemetery and leave by the Gambetta gate.

Hours and getting there

From 16 March to 5 November the cemetery opens at 8:00 on weekdays, 8:30 on Saturdays and 9:00 on Sundays and public holidays, and closes at 18:00. From 6 November to 15 March it closes at 17:30. No one is let in during the last 15 minutes. The City of Paris can close it in storms or high wind, so check paris.fr on a rough day.

The main gate is on boulevard de Ménilmontant, nearest Métro Philippe Auguste (line 2). Père Lachaise station (lines 2 and 3) is a few minutes away, and Gambetta (line 3) serves the eastern gate. Allow at least two hours and wear proper shoes; the paths are cobbled, steep in places and uneven.

How to visit respectfully

This is a working cemetery. Funerals still take place here and families come to visit their dead, so keep voices down, stay on the paths, and do not sit or climb on tombs. Leave nothing at the graves but flowers. The ghost tours are lively, but they too are told quietly among the stones.

Pairing it with the Catacombs

The bones under Denfert-Rochereau came from the cemeteries Paris closed in the late 18th century; Père Lachaise, opened in 1804, is where the city buried its dead afterwards. The two make a natural day, ossuary in the morning, cemetery in the afternoon. See Catacombs of Paris tickets for the ossuary, Paris ghost tours for an evening walk, and underground Paris tours for the rooms the public route skips.