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NO ONE HAS ever woken up alive in Airbnb’s latest rental offer, but then again, no one has ever spent the night alongside six million dead Parisians in the city’s Catacombs.
For Halloween, the home rental website is offering brave travellersa night in the sprawling tunnels filled with skulls and bones that is one of Paris’s most popular — and ghoulish — attractions.
The competition launched on the website offers two people a night in the Catacombs on 31 October, with a “real bed”, dinner with private concert and breakfast.
The listing reads:
Before bedtime, a storyteller will have you spellbound with fascinating tales from the catacombs, guaranteed to produce nightmares. Finally, enjoy dawn with the dead, as you become the only living person ever to wake up in the Paris catacombs.
Town hall sources the California-based Airbnb paid up to €350,000 to privatise the tunnels.
The transfer of human remains from Parisian cemeteries to the tunnels began towards the end of the 18th century when authorities realised that the decomposition of bodies in the city’s cemeteries was not particularly good for public health.
“It was said that the wine was turning bad and the milk was curdling,” Sylvie Robin, the site’s curator, told AFP in an interview last year.
Among the bones lining the walls of the two-kilometre long tunnels — only a small part of a network of abandoned underground quarries — are pictures and quotes about mortality.
“Think in the morning that you might not survive until the evening, and in the evening that you might survive until the morning,” reads one.
The House Rules section on Airbnb, which allows property dwellers and owners to rent a room or entire home, warns guests to “respect the Catacombs as you would your own grave”.
The Catacombs, some 20 metres under the sewers and metro system, lures some 500,000 visitors a year. It has already been rented out to film crews and for fashion shows.
Writers like Victor Hugo, Gaston Leroux and Anne Rice have all drawn inspiration from the spooky network of tunnels.
Airbnb, which was launched in 2008 and now has some 40 million users worldwide, recently agreed to pay a tourist tax to Paris from each of its bookings in the city.
The website has raised the ire of traditional hotel chains who see it as a rival that flouts tax laws.
The Paris town hall said the privatisation of the Catacombs would “boost capital by finding new sources of revenue (and allow for) the preservation of this heritage site.”
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Do all the toe rags end up in spain.
fun in the sun (with a gun) sorry hun for the pun
U ok Hun?
Malaya as in Malaysia ? Off the topic
They can keep her.
Mad how they’re all in Marbella and Porto Banus. Torremolinos amd Benalmadema are now becoming the nicer safer resorts.
All of the Irish trash over in Spain, that’s open borders for you, the Spanish should have stricter border controls and stop Irish Christians going over there and becoming involved in criminality and drug-dealing, if the Irish can’t respect the local laws and customs they should be shipped back to where they came from. Check out this video of Irish Christians bringing their debauched lifestyle to the Costa del Sol in Spain, is this what we want to happen in our country with open borders? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9p7Ur15IdA
That sounds fair enough, dude.
Excellent stuff Dick. Top marks.
Breaking my resolve not to comment but love this from Richard!
Spoh on Richard if Joe Stalin was still around the drug pushing parasites wouldn’t have an easy life he said one time if a man is causing problems in a community the answer is to put that man to sleep, no man no problem, so simple, yet I’m hearing on radio every day where decent people are selling their homes to pay off debt to these parasites and where the gardai tell them there’s nothing they can do to help. Unbelievible, if Michael Collins or any of those men who stood with him were around today they wouldn’t hesitate to put those parasites to sleep and they certainly wouldn’t be cowed by PC
You’re judging your justice on a dead man. The day has changed. The forces who wish to act are constrained by the people who harp on about the past. They elevate the past while living in it and denegrate the present. You can’t have your cake and shit on it at the same time.
Good……work together and get them all. Women incl
There is clearly a cultural problem with the Irish, they are constantly involved violent crimes. Europe should close the borders to the Irish until they learn to adhere to European culture.
have your say