Actually it’s more about Paris from the «downside» because today we are going to speak about a totally different city from the one we all got used to – we will speak about the underground life of Paris .

First goes Paris Métro (or Métropolitain) which was first open back in 1900. A first train had only three wooden cars and 3 years after opening the great catastrophe happened – the fire which had suddenly begun in the metro carried 84 people lives away. Instead of stopping the driver kept the train moving until it was back in the tunnel, and only then he stopped for help at the first station. That only strengthened the fire and became a reason of sad consequences.

One of the Paris Métro symbols is the original art nouveau entrances (glass and cast-iron canopies) made according to the project of famous architecture Hector Guimard, and 83 of them still survive.

Today Paris is the second busiest metro system in Europe after Moscow . But underground Paris is much more than just 199 km of metro lines. Besides that Paris catacombs and city canalization attract people from all over the world. Is there any need in saying that all these tree underground systems repeatedly cross each other?

Paris catacombs is another important part of the city inner world. Catacombs is nothing but 300 km of subterranean tunnels and caverns organized in the end of 18 th century which became a museum in 1867. Tourists can see only a little part of the labyrinth which entrance starts with the words: « Stop! Here is the empire of death». After that goes 1,5 km of tunnels packed with femurs, fragments of backbones, skulls, edges and smaller parts of a human skeleton. During the French revolution Paris cemetery didn’t have enough place for dead bodies anymore and it was decided to create three new large-scale suburban cemeteries and to put all existing within the city limits – under the ground. And since 1786 till 1860 about 6 million of skeletons were moved down.

But Paris from the inside is not only about metro and catacombs. Can you believe that twenty metres below the Paris pavements is truly another world? And this mysterious world is inhabited by vagabonds, drug dealers and even underground movie freaks.

A special «sport police» group observes the situation under the city ground. And that is also «the place of glory» for urban explorers so popular in Paris . Group of people comes together not for some special scientific searches but for «living in digging» – meaning these people spend all their free time discovering unusual, mystic and even frightening things under the ground. Thus, back in 2004 a group of urban explorers found a real underground movie theatre organized by «movie philes» or a sect as it got known later. This cinema was going 18 metres under had an amphitheatre shape with terraces cut into the rock and chairs, and a huge screen with professional projectors. Next to the movie theatre there was a bar and the whole place had electricity – later on the police was wondering how the electricity cables could get in there without anybody knowing. The next day when the officers came back to lift the cinema equipment upward they found absolutely nothing but a little note on the floor saying «Do not try to find us».

The famous photographer Patrick Alk, the author of the book « Discovering the Paris underground», commented this weird case on the radio saying: «There is about a dozen more of such movie theaters under the ground. Does it make any difference if the police just found one of them? You guys can’t even imagine what’s going on underneath there». And it looks like we really don’t.