Père-Lachaise Cemetery: 4,134 Trees and Nearly 140 Animal Species, a Wild Refuge

At Père-Lachaise Cemetery, the end of pesticide use and a looser management of the avenues have allowed spontaneous plants, birds, and foxes to make a comeback. City of Paris inventories now describe it as one of the capital’s richest sites for urban biodiversity. A look back at the choices that transformed this necropolis in eastern Paris.

Opened on May 21, 1804 on Mont-Louis Hill, the cemetery spans 43 hectares, among the most wooded in inner Paris

Père-Lachaise welcomed its first burial on May 21, 1804, on the former Mont-Louis estate in today’s 20th arrondissement. The architect Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart had drawn up its plan. Several expansions in the 19th century subsequently increased its area to about 43 hectares.

The site remains an active cemetery. According to the City of Paris, it hosts nearly 10,000 funeral ceremonies per year and around 3 million visitors. However, once the gates close, the absence of any night lighting leaves the grounds to the animals.

The plant heritage counts 4,134 trees recorded. Linden trees, horse-chestnuts, maples, cypresses, and ashes dominate, while nine specimens are listed as remarkable. Among them is a Montpellier maple planted in 1833, the oldest of its kind in Paris.

Since 2015, municipal gardeners maintain the avenues without pesticides, seven years before the legal obligation

The City of Paris states that the upkeep of Père-Lachaise has been carried out without phytosanitary treatment since 2015. The workers thus had to abandon chemical weed control between the graves. As a result, mosses, lichens, yellow stonecrop, and ferns have recolonized stones and gaps.

The national framework arrived later. The Labbé law of February 2014 prohibited synthetic pesticides for local authorities in green spaces, promenades, and roadways as of January 1, 2017. However, cemeteries were only targeted by the order of January 15, 2021, applicable on July 1, 2022.

Alongside this, the City highlights this flora in a nature trail within its Balades Paris durable app.

Nearly 140 species of wild animals, including the red fox established there since spring 2020, frequent the sections

Between 2010 and 2020, more than 220 wild plant species were observed on the site. Violets, herb-Robert geranium, wood avens, and St. John’s wort feed a host of insects, including a wasp-mimicking fly, the syrphid hoverfly. Moreover, this spontaneous flora supports the entire food chain.

Over the same period, 62 species of birds were counted, from the green woodpecker to the crested tit, including the European sparrowhawk. Seven species of bats hunt on site, including the common pipistrelle. The pine marten, the hedgehog, and the tawny owl complete this nocturnal portrait.

The red fox has lived there and reproduced since spring 2020, according to the City. The fox kits captured by the conservator Benoît Gallot, author in 2022 of The Secret Life of a Cemetery, brought this presence to light far beyond the neighborhood.

Mown slopes once a year and proximity to the Petite Ceinture, a management that connects the cemetery to the rest of the city

The flora also benefits from a unique annual mowing on the slopes. The plants thus have time to set seed and reseed. Consequently, insects and small mammals find shelter and food from one season to the next.

The cemetery does not operate in isolation, however. To the east, the Petite Ceinture, an old vegetated railway line, forms an ecological corridor that facilitates wildlife movements. Ultimately, Père-Lachaise illustrates how a place of memory can become a link in Paris’s green network.