Beneath Paris Exists a Hidden City of Galleries, Rooms and Chambers – Ten Times the Area of Central Park

“Paris has another Paris under herself,” Victor Hugo wrote, in “Les Misérables,” of the sewer system, “which has its streets, its intersections, its squares, its dead ends, its arteries and its circulation.”

Much of Paris was built from its own underland, hewn block by block from the bedrock and hauled up for dressing and placing into such iconic buildings as Notre-Dame Cathedral, the Louvre, and Saint-Eustache Church.

The result of more than six hundred years of quarrying is that beneath the southern portion of the upper city exists its negative image: a network of more than two hundred miles of galleries, rooms and chambers, extending beneath several arrondissements.

Robert Macfarlane‘s feature in the New Yorker explores the history with a journey through the vides de carrières—the quarry voids, the catacombs, which together total an underground space around ten times the space of Central Park.

Source: The Invisible City Beneath Paris