Melaten Cemetery Life, Love & Death Guided Tour Cologne

Melaten Cemetery: from leper hospital to city cemetery

Melaten takes its name from the French word for sick, because a leper hospital stood here from the twelfth century on the road to Aachen, well outside the medieval walls of Cologne. For centuries the site was also the place of public executions. When French rule banned burials inside the city in 1804, the authorities chose this ground for a new cemetery, and Melaten was consecrated in 1810. It grew with the city into an area of about forty hectares holding around fifty-five thousand graves, and today it is the principal cemetery of Cologne and a listed monument.

Your guide opens the Melaten Cemetery tour with this history at the Aachener Straße gate, explaining how the layout of avenues, the old wall and the chapel still follow the plan of two hundred years ago. Many people ask whether Melaten Cemetery is worth visiting if you are not interested in graves; the answer is that it is a park and an open-air museum as much as a burial ground.

The central avenue and the great tombs

The spine of the cemetery is a long central avenue leading from the Aachener Straße gate towards the chapel, lined with the most monumental tombs of the nineteenth century. Cologne's bankers, factory owners, publishers and merchants competed here with Gothic chapels, classical temples, bronze angels and weeping figures in white marble, which is why locals nicknamed the stretch the Millionaires' Avenue. Walking it is like reading the economic history of the city, from the chocolate and perfume makers to the builders of the railways.

This is the part of the walk where the guide tells the stories of love and loss carved into the stones: a wife who had her husband's likeness reproduced in bronze, families who built their vaults before they died, and the fashion for symbolism in the Art Nouveau years. The avenue takes about forty minutes of the tour, with time to look closely at the sculpture.

The chapel of St. Mary Magdalene and Lazarus

The oldest building on the grounds is the small chapel of St. Mary Magdalene and Lazarus, which belonged to the medieval leper hospital and was rebuilt in the thirteenth century. Dedicated to the two saints associated with the sick, it is one of the few surviving witnesses of the hospital that gave the cemetery its name, and it still serves for funerals today. Around it lay the hospital buildings and the plot where the lepers themselves were buried, a corner the guide points out because almost nothing else of that world remains.

From the chapel the Melaten walk continues into the older sections of the cemetery, where the graves of the early nineteenth century are simpler and the trees are at their largest. If you plan how to get to Melaten Cemetery on your own afterwards, remember that the chapel stands near the middle of the grounds, about ten minutes from either gate.

The Grim Reaper and the art of the tombs

The most photographed monument in Melaten is a life-size figure of Death with his scythe, carved in the mid-nineteenth century for a family tomb and now the unofficial emblem of the cemetery. The skeletal figure in a cloak stares at passers-by, and the guide uses it to explain how people of the time thought about mortality and why such an image was chosen for a grave. Nearby stand tombs in every style of the last two centuries, from Egyptian pylons to modern glass and steel, and several graves of carnival societies decorated with the colours of the Cologne carnival.

The guide also explains the practical side: how graves are leased and reused, why some famous vaults can be taken over by new families, and how the cemetery garden workers keep the lanes. Visitors interested in sculpture should allow extra time after the tour, as there is far more than two hours can show.

Melaten as a park and how to visit

Melaten is as much a green space as a cemetery. Thousands of trees, some planted when the grounds opened, shelter woodpeckers, owls, squirrels, foxes and the flocks of green ring-necked parakeets that now live wild in Cologne, and in spring the lanes are full of birdsong. The paths are wide and level, which is why the Melaten Cemetery guided tour is barrier-free and suitable for wheelchairs and pushchairs; the whole route is about two kilometres and never hurried.

The cemetery lies in the Lindenthal district, west of the centre: tram lines 1 and 7 stop at Melaten directly in front of the Aachener Straße gate, about fifteen minutes from the cathedral. Melaten Cemetery opening hours run from early morning to dusk every day, so you can return on your own afterwards. The best time to visit Melaten Cemetery is spring or autumn, when the foliage frames the monuments and the light is soft.