The Doors' front man, who died in 1971 in mysterious circumstances, is a cult figure, and certainly not the only celebrity whose final resting place gets visited by scores of tourists in the French capital. Just a few kilometres to the west, some young German women cluster around the grave of Heinrich Heine in Montmartre Cemetery. The poet often has female visitors. Luckily, there is always someone nearby who can point the perplexed visitor in the right direction. A map with numbers and names is often essential if you want to navigate your way through the sea of bigger and smaller graves in these cemeteries, despite their rational layout.
Coach tours swarm down the lanes dividing the rows of graves.
Kitted out with a rucksack and a snack for the hike, lone tourists from across the face of the globe wander here and there until they have found every last musician, painter or writer mentioned in their guidebooks. Searching for a cemetery's famous inhabitants can take for hours, and is often an exhausting affair. Pere Lachaise, the city's largest cemetery, is an inviting expanse of picturesque light and shadow. Laid out by Napoleon in 1803, the wooded hillside offers a view of the city stretching out westwards beneath it. Much favoured by the bourgeoisie, the cemetery was enlarged no less than six times within its first 100 years.