General information
Père Lachaise Cemetery (French: Cimetière du Père-Lachaise; officially, cimetière de l'Est, "East Cemetery") is the largest cemetery in the city of Paris, France at (48 ha, 118.6 acres),though there are larger cemeteries in the city's suburbs.

Père Lachaise is one of the most famous cemeteries in the world. Located in the 20th arrondissement, it is reputed to be the world's most-visited cemetery, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors annually to the graves of those who have enhanced French life over the past 200 years. It is also the site of three World War I memorials.


About Cemetery
Père Lachaise is located on Boulevard de Ménilmontant. Métro station Philippe Auguste on line 2 is next to the main entrance, while the station called Père Lachaise, on line 3, is 500 metres away near a side entrance. Many tourists prefer the Gambetta station on line 3 as it allows them to enter near the tomb of Oscar Wilde and then walk downhill to visit the rest of the cemetery.

Origins

The cemetery takes its name from Père François de la Chaise (1624–1709), confessor to Louis XIV, who lived in the Jesuit house rebuilt in 1682 on the site of the chapel. The property, situated on the hillside from which the king, during the Fronde, watched skirmishing between the Condé and Turenne, was bought by the city in 1804, laid out by Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart, and later extended.

The cemetery was established by Napoleon I in 1804. Cemeteries had been banned inside Paris in 1786, after the closure of the Saints Innocents Cemetery (Cimetière des Innocents) on the fringe of Les Halles food market, on the grounds that it presented a health hazard. (This same health hazard also led to the creation of the famous Parisian catacombs in the south of the city.) Several new cemeteries replaced the Parisian ones, outside the precincts of the capital: Montmartre Cemetery in the north, Père Lachaise in the east, and Montparnasse Cemetery in the south. At the heart of the city, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, is Passy Cemetery.

How to Get there?

A number of metro stations are stopping at Latin quarter.

Metro: Gambetta, Père Lachaise, Phillipe Auguste