Thousands of corpses face eviction from Spanish cemetery after relatives fail to pay rent on plots

Thousands of corpses could soon be evicted from a Spanish cemetery - because relatives of the deceased have failed to keep up with rental payments on their burial plots. A total of 7,000 people laid to rest in the Torrero municipal graveyard, in the northern city of Zaragoza, face being dug up and reburied in common ground.



City officials have started warning relatives and caretakers of the sites that they should pay up or face eviction - by placing stickers on the sites whose leases are up. Torrero, like many Spanish cemeteries, no longer allows people to buy grave sites. It instead leases them out for periods of five or 49 years. In many cases the leases have run out because relatives - or caretakers - have died themselves, or moved house and failed to renew the contract.

In other cases, family descendants no longer want to pay for relatives' graves. The graveyard began stepping up its search for defaulters around two years ago, with relatives or caretakers given six months to respond. The sticker campaign was planned to coincide with the November 1 Catholic holiday, on which people customary visit graveyards.


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Jose Abadia, deputy urban planning manager for the city, said that since then hundreds of people had made inquiries about the status of their relatives' graves. He said the remains from some 420 crypts had been removed in recent months, and that the 7,000 cases involved graves whose leases had not been renewed for 15 years or more. Torrero cemetery has a total of 114,000 graves.