A HISTORY OF

CEMETERIES IN MADRID

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Like libraries and museums, cemeteries also tell a part of each city's history. In fact, they are open-air museums

Every epitaph, photograph embedded onto a tomb and funerary sculpture is a reflection of a past that becomes more and more diluted as time goes by.

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Up until the 18th century, the dead were buried in churches, but because of the lack of space in chapels and adjacent cemeteries, other spaces came into use.

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Further, society's most learned believed that cemeteries should be located outside cities, as rotting corpses bring disease and bad smells in spite of being buried several metres underground.

In 1787, King Carlos III forbade burying the dead inside churches. But it was not until 1808, during the reign of Joseph Bonaparte, when the first cemeteries outside the city were built.

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King Charles III of Spain

Joseph Bonaparte

The North cemetery was built near what is now Glorieta de Quevedo, and the South cemetery was located near Puerta de Toledo. Both were built in areas at the start of the 19th century were in the city outskirts.

Meanwhile guilds and societies established their own graveyards in the city's environs, where they could bury their dead. It was in this way that numerous other cemeteries came into being, such as the San Isidro and Santa María graveyards.

THE SAN ISIDRO CEMETERY

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Founded in 1811, this has traditionally acted as the Madrid nobility's cemetery. Its pantheons are wealthy and sumptuous to the point that they shame the majority of the city's houses.

It is an inventory of sorts of the 19th century's various architectural styles, leading us from historicism to modernism.

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