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!

A grave situation in the dead centre of the town

I did a summer stint on parks, gardens and cemeteries when I was a boy. I still tell stories of those few months. The first time was, I think, in Hollywell Green. A Victorian mausoleum appropriate for the status of one of the mill owning families of the time. Before anyone thought to brick in the heavy, lead lined mahogany coffins, putrefaction and excellent craftsmanship produced a splendid time bomb designed to spew bone fragments left right and centre. One of my gofer jobs was to check for bones and sweep them up before the family and undertakers turned up with the latest of the family line.

Spanish graveyards are different to British ones. Well different and the same. Spaniards have mausoleums too for those old powerful families. I suppose it was wine or saffron or something instead of wool. Who knows. The idea is the same though, rich folk lording it over the people who made them rich even when they are all dead.

So there are mausoleums and there are graves, the sort where the coffins are lowered into a pit dug into the ground. Think of the scene in one of those old cowboys where the makeshift wooden cross marks the spot and one cowboy, hat in hand says "Someone should say some words". So far, then, Britain and Spain are much of a muchness.

But Spaniards are flat dwellers. Not so much where we live, in the country, surrounded by trilling birds and old blokes in straw hats working the earth, but in anywhere with any population Spaniards tend to live in flats, in apartments if you prefer. In the older blocks, the one without lifts, the top floor flats are cheaper. Nobody wants to haul their degradable plastic bags full of groceries up six flights of stairs to the third floor and older people don't want to buy a flat and then spend the rest of their days as semi prisoners, staring out of the window.

It's the same when they're dead. Nowadays cremation is growing in popularity but until recently it was always burial. Burial with a difference for we Brits. The Spaniards build a sort of thick wall, or a double faced chalet. In the outside walls they leave space for something akin to lengthened pigeon holes; pigeon holes long enough to take a coffin. When the time comes the coffin is hoisted up, horizontally and slid into a hole in the wall. The pigeon hole is sealed with something rough and ready and later, probably, with a commemorative stone. The rental on the nichos, niches, that's what the pigeon holes are called, is very low. And, just as with the flats, the higher niches, the ones you need a ladder to get to to put on flowers and to clean the stone are cheaper. If you're really poor, if nobody is willing to pay for your disposal then the town hall will bury you but you go into a common grave. Bones cleaned out of older niches, to make way for new occupants, also go into the same space. If I've mis-remembered that the correct version is in this article that I wrote for the old TIM magazine

Nowadays, with cremations, lots of the urns also go into niches, smaller niches, sometime with the urn on view but more often the urn is treated like a coffin and walled in and given a commemorative stone.

I like Spanish cemeteries. The architecture of the mausoleums is often incredible. The rows and rows of niches are nearly always well cared for and the system itself is neat. They are usually very colourful too because the niches that don't have fresh flowers nearly always have colourful plastic ones instead. Alcoy does tours around their cemetery so I thought it must be worth a look and I went over there yesterday. The snaps are here. Usually Spanish cemeteries are oases of tranquillity but, at the start of November, on All Saint's Day, most families turn out to spruce up the family plot. The graveyards become just as noisy as anywhere else with hundreds of people out and taking advantage of the opportunity to greet friends and neighbours alike.

One last, very positive, thing about Spanish cemeteries is that they always have toilets. Nowadays, knowing where the nearest toilet is is often important to me.

Very, very grave

Today is All Saints' day in Spain. Well I suppose it's All Saint's all over the Catholic World, maybe farther afield, anywhere in the Christian World. How would I know without asking Google? Anyway, where was I? Oh Yes, so it's the day or at least the period when Spanish families go and clean up the family niches, mausoleums and pantheons.

Yesterday, on Saturday afternoon, the local Town Hall here in Pinoso offered a guided tour of the local cemetery to tie in with the general theme. I thought it was a great idea and I signed up straight away but nearly everyone else I spoke to about it seemed to think it was a bit strange. Indeed Maggie, who I'd signed up for the visit, decided to give it a miss so I went by myself. Amazingly, I was the only Brit in the group. There aren't many things where we aren't represented.

The Mayor and a couple of councillors were there but it was someone called Clara who did the tour. I don't know who she is but I have to say that she did a superb job. Strangely, she started her introductory remarks by saying that some people thought that the idea of a graveyard tour was a bit rocambolesco (bizarre) but she hoped that after we'd done it we wouldn't agree. Maybe she'd talked to some of the same people as me.

Clara started from the entrance way explaining why cypress trees outside (it's yews, tejos, in the UK isn't it?) went on to the reason that the graveyard had been moved from alongside the church and near the town centre as a result of a decree by the provisional government sheltering in Cadiz at the start of the 19th Century and then went on to explain the history of the cemetery in general and some of the specific tombs in particular.

We saw the disused room where autopsies were once performed, we went underground to see the grave of the first person buried there in 1912 - someone who gets free rental of their plot. We saw political rivals buried side by side, we saw Modernist and Gothic style pantheons and someone with the group had a book, a family heirloom passed from eldest son to eldest son, that explained the history and management of her own eighty space family mausoleum. The Mayor did the bit about the ossuary (the place where remains removed from old and abandoned graves and plots are buried together) in Valencià but I got the drift and I knew why Eli, another councillor, laid a floral tribute by the little sculpture there.

The whole thing lasted about an hour. One of the best small scale visits I've done for ages. Whoever thought of that idea deserves a slap on the back.