Jules Verne and Victor Hugo Once Came to See the Mummies Under This Church

In 1791, when Bordeaux cleared the burial grounds around its parish churches, workers digging beneath Basilique Saint-Michel uncovered 74 bodies that had naturally mummified in the ground — no embalming, just something about the clay-rich soil and local conditions that preserved skin and features intact. The find became one of the city's biggest tourist draws for nearly two centuries, displayed in a deliberately eerie crypt setting beneath the tower and pulling in visitors that reportedly included Victor Hugo and Jules Verne, both of whom found the display strange enough to write about. Exposure to open air eventually caused the remains to deteriorate, and in 1979 they were sealed in coffins and reburied anonymously in a nearby cemetery. A video projection in the crypt today is the only trace left of one of Bordeaux's strangest attractions.

Darwin Ecosystem exists because nobody stopped the people who broke in. The site was a military barracks until the army abandoned it in 2005, after which squatters, graffiti artists, and skaters moved into the empty buildings before any official plan existed for the space. Rather than evict them, a local entrepreneur built an actual redevelopment project around what was already happening there, officially launching it in 2009 on a date chosen to mark Charles Darwin's 200th birthday. The indoor skatepark inside was built almost entirely from salvaged construction materials, and the grounds now also host a working urban farm — food grown on the same land where the occupation that saved the site began.