The Secret City Beneath Paris: Inside the World of the Cataphiles
Paris at night is a familiar sight—cobblestone streets, dim bistros, the distant twinkle of the Eiffel Tower. But descend through a hidden trapdoor or manhole and the city takes on a very different aspect. In recent years, groups of cataphiles—urban explorers of Paris’s underground—have emerged in alleyways after midnight, hurriedly sealing iron grates behind them.[1] These young Parisians treat the underworld as “just another Friday night out,” slipping unseen into a labyrinth of tunnels that runs roughly 280 kilometers under the city.[2][3]
In a forgotten ossuary far below street level rest the bones of over six million Parisians, a stark reminder that “Paris is literally built on fragile foundations.”[4][5] Only a mile or so of this underground expanse is open to tourists; beyond that, every unmarked gallery is off-limits and off-limits alone to a secretive subculture.
Section Index
The Underground Network
Parisians walk every day over the remains of their ancestors. In the official Catacombs of Paris—a stone ossuary consecrated in 1786—neat stacks of femurs and skulls have been arranged into decorative arches. But those six million bones live in only 1.5 kilometers of the network; the rest of the abandoned quarries under Paris lie empty and unlit.[4][3] For cataphiles, that off-limits vastness is the draw.
- Location and scale: The Mines of Paris form an enormous underground city. A maze of former limestone quarries and tunnels extends roughly 280 km beneath the streets.[2][3] Only a small portion (about 1.5 km) is set up as the public Catacombs ossuary, full of bones and crypts. The rest is a ghost network of dark halls.
- Legality: Officially, unauthorized entry to these tunnels has been banned since 1955.[2][3] A special unit of Paris inspectors, later known colloquially as the cataflics, patrols the subterranean terrain.[3] Offenders can be fined—typically around €60—but enforcement is modest.[6][7]
- History: The tunnels were charted by the Inspection Générale des Carrières (IGC) after deadly cave-ins in the 1770s. Louis XVI created the IGC by royal decree in 1777 to map and shore up the quarries.[8] Over the 19th century, the empty mines were repurposed as cemeteries. Starting in 1785, corpses were exhumed from overcrowded Paris churches and packed into the caverns. Eventually “bones from over six million bodies were shaped into archways, tunnels, and walls” as if into a vast mosaic.[5][4] Napoléon opened the ossuary to tourists in 1809; today about 600,000 people a year walk the safely lit public trail below Place Denfert-Rochereau.
For more information on A Story In Paris check out the production’s official page.
Cataphile Culture and Activities
Since the mid-20th century, however, a fringe community has grown up in the illegal sections. In the 1980s a new generation of adventurers calling themselves cataphiles (“lovers of the catacombs”) turned the quarries into “Paris’s Hades,” carving out secret lairs.[9] These urban explorers view the underground as a giant private museum and playground. Cataphiles range widely in age and background—from art students and anthropology grads to engineers and casual thrill-seekers[10][11]—but they share a fascination with Paris’s hidden landscape. As one insider put it, the cataphile community is “absolutely huge… hundreds of thousands of people,” many of whom go down to “party, explore, relax, even just to take their dogs for a walk.”[11]
Cataphiles descend for hours, nights, or even weeks at a time. They explore, trying to understand the labyrinthine map of passages. They map: every new passage is drawn in meticulous hand-drawn charts, updated by successive visitors.[12][13] They build: using battery-powered drills and jackhammers, they widen openings or dig narrow chatières (“cat-ways”) to connect chambers.[14][12]
They preserve and create art: murals of graffiti, carvings of gargoyles and saints, and even entire dioramas fill the walls. Cataphiles have sculpted castles of stone, mosaic disco-balls in vaulted rooms, and chapels lined with tiles.[15][12] A famous example (since dismantled by police) was a fully equipped clandestine movie theater with seating, bar, and projector built into the rock.[16][17]
In effect, the tunnels are self-styled as an unauthorized museum. The cataphiles watch over it closely: they quietly clean chambers, rebuild sculptures, and police graffiti. One observer notes a “great community spirit”—cataphiles band together to “rebuild a sculpture or remove graffiti” after defacements, while sharing food and keeping the place tidy.[18]
Social Life Underground
These underground vaults also serve as secret speakeasies and salons. Cataphile gatherings range from hushed meetups to full-blown parties. Fine dining, concerts and costume balls are not unheard of beneath Paris. Chroniclers describe scenes of candlelit dinners (with Fondue or raclette cheese), live music, poetry readings, and even black-tie parties in the dark. Birthday celebrations, Halloween carnivals and improvised nightclubs have all taken place under the city.[17][19]
For cataphile Claire (age 25), going underground is “somewhere to get together with my friends more than anything,” often feasting on raclette or fondue by headlamp.[20] Even races have been organized: old “catasprints” where participants bolt from one secret exit to another.[21] In short, the tunnels are a hidden bohemia, a club with its own laws and no bouncers—”there are no rules,” as one cataphile quips.[20]
Cataphiles emphasize that underneath Paris they enjoy a freedom impossible above ground: no authorities, no crowds, no one monitoring cell-phone signals (there is no reception at all).[22][12] The silence is profound—broken only by distant dripping water, occasional groans of settling rock, or the far-off roar of the Metro overhead. It is, as one young explorer put it, “like the upside down from Stranger Things“[23]: a place both familiar and alien, where the centuries mingle in mute passageways.
Gatekeepers of the Underground
Even so, the cataphile world is not a free-for-all. In place of police, the explorers enforce their own code. By custom, money is taboo in the tunnels; instead, beer and food are shared among friends. Valuable items and skeletons are (mostly) left untouched. In the catacombs, the living pay homage to the dead by caring for their city’s hidden heritage.
Many cataphiles bristle at outsiders or thrill-seekers who treat the site as a daredevil game. “They hate journalists,” laughs Claire, noting how viral videos or hashtags tend to draw careless crowds. When amateurs swarm a newly revealed shaft, she explains, the net effect can be pollution and vandalism: “abandoned trash, broken glass, too many people getting hurt.”[24] To avoid that fate, cataphiles guard their knowledge jealously. Secret entrances are whispered only among trusted members, and maps circulate in low resolution or code. In this sense they see themselves as gatekeepers, preserving the tunnels’ magic from the “careless, cheap-thrill and viral-content-seeking visitors.”[25]
This subterranean fraternity has all the quirks of a society—”same assholes you find everywhere,” as Claire admits—but there is a thread of esprit commun. A National Geographic profile finds that, despite its outlaw nature, the cataphile community “really does look after one another.” Off-limits art gets mended, graffiti that defiles a mural gets scrubbed away, and equipment for new digs is shared. People even leave behind waterproof pamphlets and illustrated “tracts” with notes, maps and underground news to guide others.[18][17] In short, beneath the sidewalks of Paris runs a subculture with its own rituals and norms.
Law Enforcement and Risk
The police (and the law) of course disapprove. Since 1955 any descent without permission is a misdemeanor in France. The IGC inspectors who inherited the king’s 18th-century quarries aggressively seal off discovered tunnels as fast as cataphiles bore new ones.[6][26] The small squad nicknamed E.R.I.C. has even drilled open walls to catch illegal raves—once uncovering the illicit cinema and dismantling it.
In practice, however, enforcement is patchy. Journalists note that only one or two cataflic patrols sweep the vast labyrinth per week, and the standard €60 fine hardly scares determined adventurers.[6][7] Cataphiles laugh that in practice they re-seal the entrance before the authorities can pull it shut, and the game continues.
Don’t forget to check out “A Story In Paris” Behind The Screenplay page for more information on the writing inspiration and process.
Why They Descend
And why do they risk it? For some, it is the allure of forbidden knowledge and the thrill of anonymity. For others, an aesthetic or existential calling. One veteran, Franck Palier, says he feels compelled by a kind of duty to their network—a belief that without cataphiles the tunnels “could become an anarchy” of vandals, rather than a curated secret history.[27][24]
Many speak simply of the peace they find there: in a city that never sleeps, the underground offers silence and simplicity. It is a journey not only into earth but into time: smartphones lose signal, day blurs into night, and Paris’s constant churn fades to dust. Descending is, in effect, a short pilgrimage to the city’s own archaeological ruin, a private contre-jour behind the theater of life above. As one cataphile puts it, “[the tunnels] are another layer to Paris. It makes the city more interesting.”[25]
For students of the city—from tourists to scholars—this world raises tricky questions. Should Paris preserve its secrets, or share them? Are the cataphiles vandals, or unacknowledged custodians of heritage? At the very least, this clandestine underworld has become part of Paris’s legend. From the cages of its living to the crypts of its dead, the cataphiles claim both as their own. And despite the fines and fences, they continue coming down, night after night, adding their footprints (and paint) to the eternal dark beneath the City of Light.[1][25]
