JOAN WAS A more salt-and-pepper version of his brother Josep. He ran Cementiri Parc Roques Blanques (“White Rocks”), one of Altima’s cemeteries. All Spanish cemeteries are public, but private companies like Altima can contract to run them for a designated length of time. The electric golf cart buzzed up and down the rolling hills, passing above-ground mausoleums and columbaria. Roques Blanques resembled many American cemeteries, with bright bursts of flowers laid out on flat granite headstones.
One aspect, however, was drastically different. Joan radioed one of the cemetery’s groundskeepers to join us at the top of a hill. There were no graves up here, just three discreet manhole covers. The groundskeeper bent down to unlock the heavy padlocks and slid back the metal circles. I squatted beside him and peeked in. Beneath the covers were deep holes carved into the hillside, filled to the top with bags of bones and piles of cremated remains.
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.
Over in Berlin, German families rent graves for twenty to thirty years. Recently, the cemetery land has become not only prime real estate for the dead, but for the living. With so many choosing cremation, long-standing cemeteries are being converted into parks, community gardens, even children’s playgrounds. This is a hard transition to reconcile. Cemeteries are beautiful spaces of cultural, historical, and community value. By the same token, they possess great cultural and restorative potential, as this Public Radio International piece reported:
Then there’s the Berlin graveyard, mostly cleared of headstones, that is now a community garden, including a small Syrian refugee garden with tomatoes, onions, and mint.
The old tombstone carver’s workshop at the entrance to the graveyard now hosts German language classes for refugees.
“It’s a space that’s been abandoned, and used for burying people, used for, now, gardening and cultivating human beings in the best way possible,” said Fetewei Tarekegn, the head gardener of the community project.
Roques Blanques is attempting to do more than just bury the dead. They have won awards for their green initiatives. Their fleet of vehicles is electric, including the hearse shaped like a silver bug, conceived by students at a Barcelona design school. The ten hectares of land lodge protected squirrel colonies, wild boars, and special houses for bats. The bat colonies are cultivated to control the dangerous invasion of the Asian tiger mosquito, although Roques Blanques received some bad press for daring to associate their cemetery with bats, vampires, the vile undead!
Environmentally sound though these initiatives may be, Roques Blanques is not a natural cemetery. The dead are required to be buried in wooden coffins in granite crypts, stacked in layers of two, three, or six people. This is puzzling. Why not place the body directly into the soil, without granite? This would allow the bones to decompose completely, meaning there would be no need for the communal grave space, thus freeing up the land. “We just don’t do that in Spain,” Joan said.
Joan has decided to be cremated, but seemed to understand the contradiction in that choice. “It takes nine months to create a baby, but we destroy the body too easily through industrial cremation processes.” He thought for a moment. “The body should take the same nine-month time to disintegrate.” I whispered to Jordi, “It sounds like he wants natural burial!”
Spain is very good at being almost green in its postmortem ideas. On our tour we passed through a grove of trees, Mediterranean and native to this area, of course. Roques Blanques will plant a tree and bury five sets of your family’s ashes around it, making it a literal family tree. They are the first cemetery in Spain to offer this option.
Roques Blanques’s “family tree” is similar to the wildly popular biodegradable urn, Bios Urn, created by a design firm in Barcelona. You might have seen it floating through your social media feed. Bios Urn resembles a large McDonald’s cup filled with soil, a tree seed, and a place for cremated remains. One of the most popular articles on the Bios Urn is called “This Awesome Urn Will Turn You into a Tree After You Die!”
It is a lovely thought, and a tree may grow from the soil provided, but after the 1,800-degree cremation process, the remaining bones are reduced to inorganic, basic carbon. With everything organic (including DNA) burned away, your sterile ashes are way past being useful to plants or trees. There are nutrients, but their combination is all wrong for plants, and don’t contribute to ecological cycles. Bios Urn charges $145 for one of their urns. The symbolism is beautiful. But symbolism does not make you part of the tree.
Roques Blanques has two cremation retorts (machines) at the cemetery, which cremate 2,600 people every year. Walking in to see the machines, I was surprised by two men in suits flanking a light wooden coffin with a cross emblem, waiting with hands folded outside a preheated retort. “Oh, you’re waiting for us, excellent! Gracias!” I am always excited to witness a cremation. It never gets old, no matter how many you’ve overseen or performed. It is powerful to be in the presence of a corpse mere moments from being transformed by fire.