English: This cemetery is the oldest of the Brussels cemeteries still in use. It is also the last "parish" type cemetery in the Brussels region, built around a church (Notre-Dame de Laeken) following the ancient Christian custom of burying the dead near the living. The other cemeteries in this category have been replaced by communal cemeteries installed at the time of their foundations outside urbanized areas.

Adorned with monuments more prestigious than each other, it gradually became the "Belgian Père-Lachaise", inspired by the Parisian example of 1804. Last residence of the nobility and the bourgeoisie during the 19th and 20th centuries, it has amassed the graves of the most eminent personalities in the political, financial, artistic, social and intellectual world who wanted to be buried next to the royal tombs. It is a real digest of artistic trends from neoclassicism to expressionism, including romanticism.

Many monuments were made in the workshop of the sculptor and stonemason Ernest Salu (1845-1923) and that of his sons, a workshop located just next to the entrance to the cemetery.