The American funeral home exhibits a suspiciously uniform aesthetic: squat midcentury brick, velvet-curtained interior, uneasy aroma of Glade plug-ins (covering over the antiseptic smells from the body preparation room). By contrast, the Altima funeral home, in Barcelona, is Google-headquarters-meets-Church-of-Scientology. It is minimalist, hypermodern, projecting the potential for cultlike activity. Its three stories feature floors, walls, and ceilings of elegant white stone. Wide balconies allow you to step outside and overlook the gardens. Not parking lots, gardens. One wall is floor-to-ceiling glass, exposing a panorama of the city stretching from the mountains to the sea. Stop by the espresso bar to take advantage of the free Wi-Fi.
The Mediterranean sun streamed through the window and reflected off the white floor. Blinded by the glare, I found myself in a perpetual cross-eyed squint during conversations with Altima’s attractive, well-groomed employees, including Josep, the dashing man in a suit who ran the whole operation.
In addition to Josep, sixty-three people work at Altima’s well-oiled facility. They pick up bodies, prepare them, file death certificates, meet with families, run funeral services. Altima handles almost one-quarter of all the deaths in Barcelona, which works out at ten to twelve bodies a day. Families choose between sepultura or incinerar (burial or cremation). Spain, thanks to its Catholic roots, has been slower to adopt cremation than most European countries; its cremation rate is at 35 percent, with urban Barcelona closer to 45 percent.
To understand the death rituals of Barcelona, you must understand glass. Glass means transparency, unclouded confrontation with the brutal reality of death. Glass also means a solid barrier. It allows you to come close but never quite make contact.
Altima boasts two large oratorios (chapels) and twenty family rooms. A family can rent one of these rooms and spend the entire day with their dead, showing up first thing in the morning and staying until the doors close at 10 p.m. And many families do. The catch is that the entire time, the body will be behind glass.
You have options as to the manner of glass you’d prefer be placed between you and your loved one. If you select a Spanish-style viewing, Altima will display your loved one in their coffin, surrounded by flowers, behind one large pane of glass, akin to a department store window. If you prefer the Catalan-style, Josep and his team will slide the open coffin into a Snow White display case in the center of the room. Either way, Altima can maintain a steady temperature around the body of 0–6 degrees Celsius (32–42 degrees Fahrenheit).
Behind the scenes, there were long corridors where the bodies in wooden coffins awaited their big moment. Pint-sized Alice in Wonderland metal doors opened to allow Altima staff to slip the body into its display or glass casket.
“What makes the glass casket Catalan-style?” I inquired.
My interpreter was Jordi Nadal, head of the publishing company that released my first book in Spain. Jordi was a Zorba the Greek character, dropping carpe diem–themed bon mots at every opportunity, keeping your wine glass full and squid and paella on your plate.
“Our Catalan families want to be closer to the dead,” was the answer.
“By putting them behind the glass like a zoo exhibit? What trouble are the corpses planning on causing, exactly?” is a thing I did not say.
The fact was, I had spent the whole week in Spain doing interviews with the national press on the ways modern funeral homes keep the family separated from the dead. Altima had read those interviews. That they had allowed me to make this visit at all was a miracle, and showed a willingness to engage on alternative methods that no American funeral corporation had ever shown me. I didn’t want to push my luck.
That’s not to say there wasn’t any tension. One employee, an older gentleman, asked if I was enjoying my time in Barcelona.
“It is gorgeous, I don’t want to leave. Perhaps I will stay here and apply for a job at Altima!” I said in jest.
“With your views we would not hire you,” he joked back, not without a slight edge to his voice.
“Do you have this phrase in Spanish, ‘Keep your friends close and enemies closer?’ ”
“Ah, yes.” He raised his eyebrows. “We’ll do that.”
The people I spoke to in Barcelona (regular citizens and funeral workers alike) complained of how rushed the process of death seemed. Everyone felt the body should be buried within twenty-four hours, but nobody was quite sure why. Mourners felt pressure from funeral directors to get things completed. In turn, the funeral directors protested that families “want things fast, fast, fast, in less than twenty-four hours.” Everyone seemed trapped in the twenty-four-hour hamster wheel. Theories for this time frame ranged from historical factors like Spain’s Muslim past (Islam requires bodies to be buried swiftly after death) to the warm Mediterranean weather, which would allow bodies to putrefy more quickly than elsewhere in Europe.
Prior to the twentieth century, it was not uncommon to believe that the corpse was a dangerous entity that spread pestilence and disease. Imam Dr. Abduljalil Sajid explained to the BBC that the Muslim tradition of burial in the first twenty-four hours “was a way to protect the living from any sanitary issues.” The Jewish tradition follows similar rules. Such fear across cultures inspired the developed world to erect protective barriers between the corpse and the family. The United States, New Zealand, and Canada embraced embalming, chemically preparing the body. Here in Barcelona they placed the body behind glass.
The shift toward removing those barriers has been slow-going, even though prominent entities like the World Health Organization make clear that even after a mass death event, “contrary to common belief, there is no evidence that corpses pose a risk of disease ‘epidemics.’ ”
The Centers for Disease Control puts it even more bluntly: “The sight and smell of decay are unpleasant, but they do not create a public health hazard.”
With this in mind, I asked Josep, the owner, if they would allow the family to keep the body at home, sans protective glass boxes. Though he insisted Altima rarely received such a request, Josep promised they would allow it, sending their employees out to the home to “close the holes.”
We took a freight elevator downstairs and stepped into the body preparation area. In Spain, bodies are so swiftly sent off sepultura or incinerar that they are rarely embalmed. Altima did have an embalming room, with two metal tables, but they only perform full embalmings on bodies that are being transported to a different part of Spain or out of the country entirely. Unlike the United States, where aspiring embalmers must pursue the overkill combination of a mortuary school degree and an apprenticeship, in Spain all training is done in-house, at the funeral home. Altima boasts of importing embalming experts from France to train their staff, “including the man who embalmed Lady Di!”
In the body prep room, two identical older women, in identical button-up sweaters with identical crucifixes around their necks, lay in identical wooden coffins. Two female Altima employees leaned over the first woman, blow-drying her hair. Two male employees leaned over the second, rubbing her face and hands with heavy cream. These bodies were on their way upstairs, destined to repose in glass coffins or behind glass walls.
I asked Jordi, my publisher, if he had ever seen dead bodies like this, without the glass barrier. With his typical verve, he allowed that although he hadn’t, he was ready for the encounter. “Seeing the truth like this, is always elegant,” he explained. “It gives you what you deserve as a human being. It gives you dignity.”
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.
Joan took us on a brief tour of the cremation room, including the fifteen-year-old cremation machine used for family-witnessed cremations. It was significantly nicer than the industrial warehouses back home. “The walls are marble from Italy, the floor is granite from Brazil,” he explained.
“Sixty percent of our families come to witness the cremation,” Joan announced. Here’s where my jaw hit the polished granite floor.
“I’m sorry, 60 percent?” I reeled.
That is an enormous number—far higher than the percentage in the United States, where many families don’t even know they have the option of witnessing the cremation.
Before the cremation began, Joan brought us just outside the room, behind—are you ready for it?—three panes of glass stretching floor to ceiling. They were identical to the three panes of glass that had separated us from the body at the funeral home. “Why do you use the glass for cremations?” I asked Joan.
“The angle is such that you can’t see fully inside the oven, to the flames,” he replied.
It was true. Try as I might, I couldn’t quite see the fire, just the edge of the cremation machine. The two men slid the coffin into the brick-lined machine. When the heavy metal door came down, they pulled a classy wooden door across the front of the retort, hiding the machine’s industrial façade.
Barcelona was the land of almost. They had initiatives for eco-cemeteries, animal conservation, and the growth of native trees. Their bodies were not embalmed, and were buried in wooden coffins. Almost a green burial, except for the granite fortress the coffin was required to be placed in. They had witness cremations that 60 percent of families attended, and funeral homes in which the family could stay the whole day with their loved one. Almost a paragon of family interaction at death, yet there was glass separating the family from the body at the viewing and at the cremation, setting up Mom as a museum exhibit.
I wanted to be self-righteous about the use of glass, but couldn’t, for this simple reason: with its elegant marble and glass, Altima had provided the one thing the United States needs more than anything—butts in the seats. People showed up for death here. They showed up for daylong viewings, sitting close vigil with the body. They showed up for witness cremations: 60 percent at this location. Perhaps the barrier of glass was the training wheels required to let a death-wary public get close, but not too close.
The cremation process would take approximately ninety minutes. Joan took Jordi, my publisher, to the back of the machine, where the family does not come. Pulling open a hinged metal window, he allowed us to peer inside the cremation chamber. Fierce blasts of fire shot down from the ceiling and devoured the top of the coffin. Jordi’s eyes widened as he took his turn peeking in, his pupils reflecting the flames.
For his trouble in showing me around Barcelona, poor Jordi had been rewarded with multiple close encounters with the dead. As we ate what seemed like a fourteen-course dinner in the city, I inquired what the day had been like for him. He thought, and replied that “when your bills come due, you have to pay them. At my company, I pay my bills. Here at this restaurant, I pay my bill. It is the same with feelings. When the feelings come, the fear of death, I must feel those feelings. I must pay my bill. It is being alive.”