Sometimes a final resting place isn’t final. Check out this story reported on FoxNews Latino:
Pushed for space, a Spanish cemetery has begun placing stickers on thousands of burial sites with lapsed leases as a warning to relatives that their ancestors face possible eviction.
Jose Abadia, deputy urban planning manager for Zaragoza in Spain’s northeast, said Monday that the city’s Torrero graveyard had already removed remains from some 420 crypts, and reburied them in common ground.
He said the cases involved graves whose leases had not been renewed for 15 years or more. Torrero, like many Spanish cemeteries, no longer allows people to buy grave sites, instead leasing them out for periods of five or 49 years.
Abadia said the cemetery began stepping up its search for defaulters around two years ago, with relatives or caretakers given six months to respond.
The stickering campaign was planned to coincide with the Nov. 1 Roman Catholic holiday, on which people customary visit graveyards.
He said that since then hundreds of people had rang to make inquiries about the status of their relatives’ burial sites.
It’s a case of cemetery management, “not to make money” as graveyards have limited space, he said.
“If we keep on building spaces for human remains, where are we going to end up? … It’s a problem that is affecting big city cemeteries more and more.”
Where are we going to end up indeed? Stories like this are why I believe that eventually cremation will be the way to go. It seems only logical…if there’s no more space underground, then build up. I see a profitable future for columbarium architects.
Gravewords 