The Secret (wild) Life of a Paris cemetery

The Secret Life of a Cemetery is the English translation of a best-selling book in France, when Benoît Gallot (curator at Père Lachaise in Paris) decided to pull back the curtains on his other-worldly workplace to discover a natural wildlife paradise – where foxes roam, birds flit between trees and wildflowers or moss encroach onto tombstones.

Born into a family of undertakers, Gallot manages 40 hectares of green space with 70,000 graves. Yet he also lives on the grounds with his young family, and provides insight into the history of graveyards.

Even though many people calls us ‘the Addams family’, neither our jobs nor the fact that we live in a cemetery have made us sad, let alone depressed. Unlike our apathetic neighbours, we are, on the contrary, determined to enjoy life to the fullest. Our children learned to ride bikes in paths lined with tombs. Like me, my four children are growing up a universe where death is omnipresent.

After six years of transformation to promote biodiversity, a family of foxes took up residence in Ivry Cemetery. You can imagine our pride! We took their arrival as the reward for our efforts to make the cemetery a place not only for the dead but also for life.