Madrid – Same Year, Completely Different

As we know, Tolomato Cemetery was closed in 1884 because of fear of yellow fever.  Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, a cemetery was opening because of another disease, cholera. The cemetery was the Cementerio de la Virgen de la Almudena, known popularly as La Almudena, in Madrid, Spain.

Plans were already underway to build a modern, 19th century cemetery that would be as big and grand as Pere Lachaise in Paris, the model for cemeteries at that time, or the famous cemeteries of Geneva and Viena. The city had decided to move all cemeteries outside of the walls, and the sudden need for burial space during the cholera epidemic of 1884 speeded things up significantly.   While there are other cemeteries in Madrid, this one has grown over the years and is the biggest, with several million people buried in it. It also includes a Jewish cemetery.

Above we see the remarkable mortuary chapel, which is near the front gates of the cemetery (below).

The style is modernist and neomudéjar, which we would refer to as ¨Moorish revival.¨ The architects were Fernando Arbós y Tremanti and José Urioste y Velada, selected by means of a competition.

The design of the cemetery is very complicated and consists of concentric rings surrounding the naturally existing hilly areas. The vaults are built into the walls of the rings, although there are also large free-standing family vaults built on top of the rings.

Like every 19th century cemetery, it is full of massive marble monuments, some adorned with statuary. The cemetery is still open and the custom of elaborate monuments still persists, as we see with this bullfighter.

There were many unusual markers, some quite elaborate. There were also some less formal but very touching tributes, such as this tiny ¨portal de Belén¨ (manger scene) placed at the foot of the vault of a man buried in 2010.  Was he someone who liked to design and build these little works, or did his family simply miss him particularly at Christmas?

During the Spanish Civil War, Madrid´s cemeteries were used by the Republicans during their occupation of the city as a place to execute their civilian enemies, which included conservative journalists, priests and members of religious orders, both male and female. This was to ¨pasear¨ someone, that is, ¨take him for a walk.¨

After the war, the national government repaid the favor, trying and executing the people it perceived as enemies, also in the cemeteries.

But now it´s just another tranquil place, filled with these solid, bleached looking granite markers and dark, still cedar and madrone trees under the white-hot Madrid summer sun, and it´s hard to imagine that it was ever anything but.

The Storage Project–Completed!

In the last few months, the TCPA has been acquiring growing amounts of “stuff” for its activities, ranging from preservation materials to tables and chairs used for our open days.  We’ve been stashing these things wherever we could, but now we finally have a space for our “stuff” and can prepare for future activities. 

The hardy band turned up once again to install the storage shed, a large vinyl Rubbermaid shed, behind one of the vaults. Here we see the tireless Bob Kennedy, with an appropriate-looking wheelbarrow. The wheelbarrow was made by Bob’s father back in the 1930s – and 70 years later, it’s still going strong. We used it to carry off the scattered metal and stone debris we found so that we could pile it neatly at the back of the lot.

Janet Jordan, who is recovering from a broken ankle, was our official reader of instructions.  She read the directions aloud while we lined up the pieces; this was an enormous help!

Here Louise Kennedy puts up a side panel.

Priscilla de la Cruz shows off the completed shed.

And we’re already starting to fill it up…we will add shelves next week so that we can store our preservation materials.  The shed is not visible from other parts of the cemetery, and will help to preserve the spacious, tranquil feel of the site.

Another Mystery Photo

John Garofalo, the Cathedral Parish administrator and TCPA board member, found this really interesting photo in an unlikely place, an office at the parish school. The photo’s owner had found it someplace up north and didn’t know anything more about it, and of course there was no other information on it.  So….what do you think?

We know that the photo was after 1853 because that was when the chapel was built.  However, did the chapel originally not have a door? In this photo, it also appears to have a cross on the roof, although different from the current cross.

The tree in the photo appears in another old photo we have, but we’re not sure of the date of that one.  The stone enclosure with the sort of “portholes” is still standing, but the stone with the cross and the scrolled name or names has disappeared, as has the vault in the lower left corner .  Some of the later (1870s and 1880s) markers don’t seem to be there, so this may be a relatively early photo. Or then again, maybe not.

I went out to the cemetery and tried to figure out where the photographer had been standing.  I took this photo below from further back and more to the left to see if I could get some idea of the general layout, but I don’t think it really revealed much of anything.

Any ideas or observations? All suggestions are welcome.

1st Ever Preservation Work Day!

The hardy band below assembled at Tolomato on a very, very hot and gnat-filled Saturday for our very first preservation work day.  Our objectives were to clean some markers in an area where we had done work earlier this spring, during the NCPTT workshop, to prepare a site for a storage shed we are installing to keep our preservation supplies on site, and to replace a brick in a long-damaged vault.

How did we do?  I’ll show you in detail over the next few days, but in the meantime, here’s a general idea. Below volunteer Elisabeth Seaton stands near the markers in a “before” photo.  We had cleaned two of the markers in this section last spring, and aimed to do 3 more today (we did five!).

Here volunteers Heather Alexander and Rosalie Cocci work on two of the markers while Matt Armstrong, our TCPA preservation pro, prepares to start on another marker and Elizabeth Seaton cleans a ledger stone.

Omitting  photos of a couple of hours of gritty, wet labor, this is what we ended up with:  A row of lovely, clean markers whose text could be read for the first time in decades. But a more detailed report on that will appear later…

You’ll notice that the marker on the left was not cleaned. This was because it is cracked and in unstable condition, so we decided to wait and save it for a major project at some point in the future.

But throughout this, we had a particularly outstanding worker:  Bob Kennedy, who toiled quietly behind the vault for 3 hours, hacking his way through roots, buried ironwork and lumps of coquina, to create a level space for the storage shed that will enable us to keep our supplies dry and at the ready for the next preservation day!

Fr. Felix Varela in Cuba

Another sighting of Fr Felix Varela was reported by TCPA member Nick McAuliffe, who came across this Cuban stamp somewhere in his internet wanderings.



Fr. Varela was born in Cuba but spent his childhood in St. Augustine, leaving for Cuba at the age of 16 to begin studies for the priesthood.  The Seminario San Carlos was the seminary where Fr. Varela studied, was ordained and taught before leaving for the Spain to take his position in the Spanish Cortes [Legislature] in 1821.  As we all know, things didn’t work out once he got to Spain, and it was from Spain that he went to the US.  He never lived in Cuba again, although he maintained his interest in Cuban political thought and in Cuban independence.  He was finally repatriated, in a sense, when his bones were returned to Cuba in 1911; his remains are now buried where he once taught.

Another Opening…

Today was the 3rd Saturday of the month, so of course Tolomato Cemetery was open.  The weather was awful – hot, muggy, and obviously the favorite weather of mosquitos and gnats, who were out in annoying clouds. 

I thought we were going to have a slow day but I had underestimated the resilience of St Augustine visitors and locals, and we ended up with a total of 320 people who entered our gates. Most of them did the self-guided tours and many of them opted for the guided tours and seemed quite interested. 

Nick McAuliffe had set out the historical photos he used in his June 29th presentation, so visitors could look at “then and now” photos at the very locations from which the photos were taken.

And perhaps we owed our success to a new addition: an 8 ft. banner hanging on the fence announcing “Tolomato Cemetery Open Today FREE!”  Few things are free for tourists in St Augustine, so how could they resist?

Cemetery Buffs

Last week I was interviewed about Tolomato Cemetery on a local radio station, WFOY, and one of the hosts mentioned that he was surprised to learn of the existence of people whose hobby is visiting cemeteries.   Judging by the websites and newsletters I have found, he’d really be surprised if he knew how many of these people there are out there, roaming the graveyards of this country and any other place they visit.

Tolomato is a tiny cemetery so we don’t get many cemetery buffs, as they are called, although this may change as word gets out that we are now open on a regular basis (3rd Saturday of every month).

In any case, to give you an idea of the potential, one of our members was trolling through cemetery websites and found “The Cemetery Club,” a website run by Illinois author and cemetery expert Minda Powers-Douglas. The website (click on the link above) has great information and is also the gateway to Epitaphs Magazine Online (EMO), a really excellent on-line journal that contains articles on a wide variety of cemetery related topics.  The magazine is also available from lulu.com in print format.

If you have always wondered about the painted skulls of Austria, go to the current edition of EMO and find out everything you need to know.  For those who have been dreaming of having their skulls painted, the practice was halted a number of years ago because of superstitions that grew up around the skulls, such as the idea that skulls could predict the winning lottery numbers!