It was our last day in Paris before we started our river tour. Over the years I have discovered that I needed four nights in a major city to get in three full days of touring. We skipped the museums to save time by not spending precious time in long lines and we concentrated on the neighborhoods. Three days is certainly not enough to do a deep dive but enough to know if you wanted to return. And I do! The weather was great the first two days. But you know the song…” I love Paris when it drizzles…” And that’s what we got, drizzle. But can you think of any better weather to visit the famous Père LaChaise Cemetery and finding Jim Morrison’s grave?
Cemeteries tell stories
Clearly I’m not the only one who loves to visit cemeteries while traveling the world. This Parisian cemetery is one of the most visited in the world, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors annually. Estimates of how many graves vary between 300,000 and 1,000,000. It is also the largest park in Paris! Some larger and popular cemeteries in New Orleans have so much traffic that they are being closed to tourists.
Cemeteries for me are like storytelling. Each headstone or crypt tells a story like what era they lived, how old they were when then died, if they married, if the husband or other family members were laid to rest beside them. It’s so tragic to see the crypts of infants and young ones. Even though tied to death these are not creepy places. They are sites of remembrance, memories. Often the headstones have expressions of love and loss. In many of these tombs religion and spirituality are present with representations of a cross or an angel. I explore a wide variety of resting places; a single grave that I found along the road in Louisiana, small ones like you would find in any town, big ones like Lafayette Cemetery in New Orleans , Bonaventure in Savannah or La Recoleta in Buenos Aires.
Père LaChaise is special in that it contains resting places of many famous people like Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf, Molière, and Chopin. The most famous American buried there is Jim Morrison, lead vocalist of the late 60s rock group The Doors. I was never a fan of the Doors but it seems many Americans visit this cemetery to find Jim Morrison’s grave.
Get a map
Finding a specific grave in Père LaChaise is no small task, even if you buy or download the map. It’s similar to visiting a large park: it’s over 110 acres, hilly in places, heavily treed, and beautiful flora. After about an hour of searching for Morrison’s resting place we were hopelessly lost. We came across two young couples from Madrid who seemed to be searching as well. We asked if they knew where the grave was located. They did. We followed them to the well-visited spot.
I was surprised to see the tomb is still replete with fresh flowers and other memorabilia. He died at age 27, found in the bathtub by his girlfriend. Authorities declared it heart failure; they did not even perform an autopsy. His grave is likely to be the most visited in the cemetery. Some list it as the fourth most-visited tourist attraction in Paris. Take THAT Mona Lisa. Decades after his tragic death, Young Jim still commands a crowd.
During the search for Morrison’s gravesite, noticed the above rose. I saw the vibrant color, the raindrops, the perfect bloom . It said: “Pick me! Pick me!” So I did. I thought later as we visited the rock singer’s shrine, I should have laid the flower on his final resting place. He would have loved it!
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