Deep beneath the bustling streets of Paris, a hidden labyrinth of tunnels houses the remains of more than six million people, originally created to manage the city's overflowing cemeteries. Tim the Yowie Man takes a trip abroad to show you more!
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00:00While the limestone voids beneath Canberra have provided challenges and obstacles for
00:05engineers and builders, particularly for major constructions like the King's Avenue Bridge
00:10and the Treasury Building, on the other side of the world, here in Paris,
00:14the Parisians have put their subterranean limestone voids to much better use.
00:21Similar to, but on a much larger scale than occurred in Canberra, much limestone was mined
00:27from beneath the city of Paris in order to make mortar for the construction of buildings.
00:32But instead of filling the voids with concrete as the footings for modern buildings,
00:36they have turned some of them into a giant burial ground, or sometimes they're called
00:42ossuries. Ossuries, or burial grounds like this one here in Paris, were created as part of
00:48the effort in the late 1700s to eliminate the city's overflowing cemeteries. It took many years
00:55of nightly processions of black cloth cavern wagons carrying millions of dead Parisians
00:59into the catacombs. Although the ossuary which houses the remains of, get this,
01:04over six million Parisians comprises only a small section of the underground mines of Paris,
01:11Paris residents often refer to the entire network as the catacombs. In the first few years,
01:18these catacombs were a disorganized repository of bones, but in 1810 it was decided to transform
01:23these caverns into a mausoleum that people could visit. In addition to the stacking of skulls and
01:29other bones seen in the catacombs today, cemetery decorations were sometimes used to complement the
01:35walls of bones. During World War II, the Nazis established an underground bunker below a high
01:42school where Parisian members of the French resistance used the tunnel system and established
01:47the headquarters from where the insurrection for the liberation of Paris was led in June 1944.
01:53Oh and before I go, did you know because the catacombs are directly under the Paris streets,
01:59large foundations cannot be built above them and many cave-ins have destroyed buildings.
02:05For this reason, there aren't many tall buildings in Paris.