Submerged cemeteries pile pain on Spain flood survivors

This picture taken on November 1, 2024 shows a coffin covered in mud and debris at a cemetery in the town of Alfafar – Copyright AFP Menahem Kahana

Alfons LUNA

More than a week after surging torrents of muddy water ravaged Spain, flooded cemeteries are making dignified burials for victims impossible and compounding the pain of bereaved survivors.

“The destruction is enormous,” said Salvador Pons, an employee at the municipal cemetery in the devastated town of Catarroja who was directing a group of volunteers helping the clean-up.

The water reached 1.70 metres (5.5 feet), damaged many of the graves and displaced the cemetery’s huge iron gates weighing 700 kilograms (1,543 pounds).

None of the seven Catarroja residents who have died since October 29 has been buried, of whom four were flood victims who must be interred rapidly as their corpses decompose, Pons told AFP.

The challenge is repeated across destroyed towns in the eastern Valencia region following Spain’s worst floods in a generation that have killed 219 people and left dozens missing.

Authorities have handed over more than 80 bodies to bereaved families, but burying them is all but impossible in inundated graveyards that resemble quagmires.

“Work has come to a halt… Two, three or four weeks will have to pass for things to be resolved,” Arturo Casan, 59, said of his gravestone business.

Helpers worked tirelessly to clear up the premises of the family firm, which has fulfilled none of the orders received since the floods. “The houses come first and then the cemeteries,” Casan conceded.

Carles Pons, rector of Catarroja’s Sant Miquel church, told AFP he has officiated no funeral masses for more than a week.

“No one has asked us for them — and in any case it would not be easy” to bury the deceased, said the 57-year-old priest.

– ‘Terrible state’ –

Funeral services in regional capital Valencia city have been helping the affected towns with cars, staff, paperwork, trips to the hospital and burials, an employee of one such company said on condition of anonymity.

“The cemeteries in the towns are in a terrible state and people are forced to give up” burying the victims there, the employee said.

A cremation or burial in Valencia city is an option, but it is common in Spain for up to three generations of a family to share a niche in the same cemetery.

“My parents have to be buried together,” Catarroja resident Juan Monrabal told local newspaper Las Provincias. 

Monrabal could lay to rest his mother, who died in the floods, in one cemetery before transferring the body to another holding his father’s grave. 

But Spanish law forbids such movements before 10 years and Monrabal, 54, fears he will not live to see the day where his parents are reunited.

“If there’s no choice but to bury them, it will have to be done wherever,” said a 69-year-old man helping to clean Catarroja cemetery who refused to give his name.