Print
Close
Cemetery to Dead: Pay or You're Out
Published December 10, 2016
Pushed for space, a Spanish cemetery in Torrero near Zaragoza has begun placing stickers on thousands of burial niches whose leases are up as a warning to relatives or caretakers to pay up or face possible eviction. (AP)
In Spain, even the dead are facing eviction.
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.
If we keep on building spaces for human remains, where are we going to end up?
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 7,000 of Torrero's 114,000 burial sites' leases had run out, many of which occurred because relatives -- or caretakers -- had died themselves, or moved house and failed to renew the contract.
In other cases, family descendants no longer wanted to pay for relatives' plots, he added.
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."
Based on reporting by The Associated Press.
Follow us on twitter.com/foxnewslatino
Like us at facebook.com/foxnewslatino
https://www.foxnews.com/world/cemetery-to-dead-pay-or-youre-out