Paris catacombs was opened in the late 18th century, the underground cemetery became a tourist attraction on a small scale from the early 19th century, and has been open to the public on a regular basis from 1874. Following an incident of vandalism, they were closed to the public in September 2009 and reopened 19 December of the same year. The official name for the catacombs is l'Ossuaire Municipal as its shown in Paris catacombs map. Although this cemetery covers only a small section of underground tunnels comprising "les carrières de Paris" ("the quarries of Paris"), Parisians today often refer to the entire tunnel network as "the catacombs".

 

The catacombs in their first years were mainly a bone repository, but Guillaumot successor from 1810, Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury, oversaw the renovations that would transform the underground caverns into a real and visitable sepulture on par with any mausoleum as its shown in Paris catacombs map. In addition to directing the arrangement of skulls and femurs into the configuration seen in the catacombs today, he used those tombstones and cemetery decorations he could find (many had disappeared after the 1789 Revolution) to complement the walls of bones.

 

The Catacombs entry is in the western pavilion of Paris former Barrière d'Enfer city gate. After descending a narrow spiral stone stairwell of 19 metres to the darkness and silence broken only by the gurgling of a hidden aqueduct channelling local springs away from the area, and after passing through a long (about 1.5 km) and twisting hallway of mortared stone as its mentioned in Paris catacombs map, visitors find themselves before a sculpture that existed from a time before this part of the mines became an ossuary, a model of France Port-Mahon fortress created by a former Quarry Inspector. Soon after, they would find themselves before a stone portal, the ossuary entry, with the inscription Arrête. C'est ici l'empire de la Mort ('Halt. This is the Empire of the Dead').