From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

by Caitlin Doughty

Someone from North America might recoil at the idea of an idyllic cemetery harboring mass graves, filled with hundreds of sets of remains. But this was business as usual at this Spanish cemetery. The dead at Roques Blanques start out in a ground grave, or in a wall mausoleum. But the dead haven’t purchased a home at the cemetery as much as they have rented an apartment. They have a lease, and their time in the grave is limited. Before a body is placed into a grave, the family must lease a minimum of five years’ decomposition time. When the corpse has decayed down to bone, they will join their brethren in the communal pits, making way for the more recently deceased. The only exceptions are made for embalmed bodies (again, rare in Spain). Those bodies may need more like twenty years for their transition. Joan’s crew will periodically peek in on embalmed bodies, and say, “Oh, okay, buddy—not done!” The corpse will have to stay in its grave or wall crypt until it is ready to join the collective bone club. This “grave recycling” is not just a Spanish practice. It extends to most of Europe, again baffling the average North American, who views the grave as a permanent home. In Seville, in the south of Spain, they have almost no available cemetery land. The cremation rate there is 80 percent (very high for Spain), because the government subsidizes cremation down to a cost of only 60–80 euro. It is economically prudent to die in Seville.