Rufus Leakin

Guru of Folklore

Pushed for space, a Spanish cemetery has begun placing stickers on thousands of burial sites whose leases are up as a warning to relatives or caretakers to pay up or face possible eviction. 

Jose Abadia, deputy urban planning manager for northern Zaragoza city, said the city’s Torrero municipal graveyard had removed remains from some 420 crypts in recent months and moved them to a common burial ground.

Torrero, like many Spanish cemeteries, no longer allows people to buy grave sites. It instead leases them out for periods of five or 49 years.Abadia said the cases involved graves whose leases had not been renewed for 15 years or more.

He said Torrero currently had some 7,000 burial sites with lapsed leases out of a total of some 114,000.

He said leases generally lapsed because the relatives or caretakers had died or had moved house and failed to renew the contract. He said in other cases, with the passing of years, family descendants sometimes no longer wanted to pay for further leases.

He said the policy was a matter of graveyard management and that graveyards were not limitless in space.

“If we keep on building and building spaces for human remains, where are we going to end up?” said Abadia. “It’s a problem that is affecting big city cemeteries more and more.

”The graveyard began looking for payment defaulters over the past two years. Abadia said the process of trying to notify relatives or caretakers and giving them a chance to decide what to do normally takes up to six months.

“We’re not doing it to make money or empty graves but rather to improve management,” said Abadia.

The sticker campaign was decided upon to coincide with the November 1st Roman Catholic holiday (All Saints Day) on which people visit graveyards. Abadia said that since then, hundreds of people had called to make inquiries about graves of their relatives.

Nowadays, Spanish cemeteries normally place coffins or cremated ash urns in niches above ground.

OK… how disturbing is this? A person lives their life as righteously they can, then when they finally are given a “resting place” in hallowed ground, they only get a temporary lease? Wouldn’t it be comforting to know that your memorial and final resting place is actually final? 

I completely understand that space is limited in many European countries, especially in the cities. Americans take the ample space we have for granted (think about it–we have states that are larger than some countries!) and if urban societies continue to expand (and they will), and a country can only extend to a particular point, something is going to have to give, because you can’t always expand and build “up.” Valuable country real estate is needed and reserved for farming in many cultures– an eminently practical solution, and better than converting pasture into yet another condo development. WE all know how well THAT is working out, these days… 

America is also a comparatively young country, so we don’t have many over-full urban graveyards that have been around as long as those in Spain. I guess when it comes to having more “living” space, where ever you are, the actually living must come first. What was once claimed by the dead will loose ground to meet practical needs, as vacant, arable land becomes more scarce, everywhere.