Guided visits in general and cemeteries in particular

Lots of the local town halls near Culebrón offer guided walks and visits. The most straightforward are things like a visit to a castle or a Bronze Age settlement where, often, the description is a routine list of dates and facts. There are, however, other visits which are much more innovative. To be honest I couldn't remember all of them if I tried but things like "theatricalised" visits are reasonably common; pointed Maid Marian hats and velvet doublet and hose in Sax Castle to explain the building's history or frock coats and Beryl Patmore uniforms at a Victorian house in Bullas through to people dressed in Civil War Republican overalls explaining the anti aircraft gun emplacement in Petrer. We've done horror stories in the Casa Modernista in Novelda and wandered around Yecla with live music to complement the buildings we were shown. For that one think musicians, using 15th Century instruments and a song relating to plague victims with the backdrop of an arch knocked through the old town walls to allow the plague carts access to the new, extended, cemetery. Sometimes the tours you have high hopes for can be a bit ordinary, cave paintings spring to mind, whereas others that sound a bit dull, like a visit to the town archives, turn out to be pretty good.

You're almost certainly aware that on November 1st, All Saint's Day, it's very common for Spaniards to go to cemeteries to clean up the family niches, pantheons and tombs. Don't confuse this with the much more elaborate symbols, rituals and celebrations that go on in Mexico on the Day of the Dead. In Spain it really is scrubbing brushes, cleaning products, rubber gloves and new flowers, plastic or real, to spruce up the tomb. It's also a good excuse to catch up with neighbours and acquaintances you haven't seen for a while before going for lunch. El Día de Todos los Santos is one of the reasons why there are a lot of cemetery visits at this time of year and that's why, a couple of weekends ago, I did a guided tour around the cemetery in Jumilla. It was probably the fourth or fifth cemetery visit I've done in Spain, one of them, in Novelda, at night and with an Art Nouveau theme. My first Spanish cemetery visit was here in Pinoso.

The Pinoso archivist has a very fertile mind and often comes up with, what I consider to be, corking ideas. I remembered the Pinoso visit as I wandered around Jumilla the other week. In Pinoso the tour began in Valenciano. Luckily, for me, someone I knew spoke up for me and pointed out that I'd only have a chance of understanding if the tour were in Castellano, Castilian Spanish. The guide obliged.

If you don't know about the organisation of Spanish cemeteries, and you're interested then have a look at this TIM article that I did years ago. The basic idea is that if you're not rich enough to have either a family tomb or a vault like pantheon, and you're being buried rather than cremated, the most usual Spanish system are nichos or niches in English. Nichos are a sort of enclosed shelving system with the commemorative stone covering the opening where the coffins can be slid in. Lots of these niches are long term rentals, maybe 75 to 99 years. The rental can be renewed but it often isn't because the family has moved on. Eventually the tenants, with unpaid rents, are evicted. Their bones and other remains are transferred to what is basically a mass grave, an ossuary. 

So, back at the tour, we were told about why the cemetery is where it is, the legislation that moved the potential health hazard away from the town centre, we were shown some of the earliest graves, we were shown how the configuration of the cemetery had changed, we had some of the funerary symbolism, especially on the more upmarket tombs, explained to us and somebody with records of the interment of their family stretching way back shared that information with us. All of this in Castilian. Then, suddenly, the description changed to Valenciano. Now although my spoken Valenciano consists of just one phrase, molt bé or very good/well, I can usually follow the thread of a presentation, up to a point, because of its similarity to Castilian. The speaker told us how the remains removed from the older graves were moved to the ossuary. The basic idea is that a trench running down one of the cemetery avenues is backfilled with the transferred remains and then paved over. The empty part has a less permanent cover and one part, the part currently in use, is left open but for a very obvious temporary cover which can be moved to one side to give access to the trench. That very straightforward process was the only part of the visit which was done in Valenciano.  I never have quite worked out why!