- This time, Lugares Míticos de Jaén publishes an article with a single photograph. We meant to photograph the San Eufrasio Cemetery, known to the people of Jaén as “the old cemetery”, but we were not allowed to. Jaén City Council forbids taking pictures inside the cemetery.
- We assume the ban is due to the sorry state of neglect the place is in, which many national media have reported. A place that holds almost 200 years of our city’s history, where many of our neighbours have relatives buried, and which also holds a mass grave of people shot under the Franco regime.
- This neglect has been going on for many years, and we do not mean to point only at the city’s current government. We point at them and at all who held office before them. We were able to visit the cemetery these days and see for ourselves the deplorable state it is in. Open niches, broken headstones, heaps of rubble piled all over the cemetery, areas fenced off for fear of collapse (some of them propped up with beams)… In short, a grotesque sight for anyone who visits, and even more so for those whose relatives rest there.
- The cemetery, closed since last December, has been opened for All Saints’ Day, and that is how we were able to visit it. We have now learnt that the City Council intends to privatise the management of the site, which is listed as a Site of Cultural Interest (BIC) and where illustrious figures of our city such as Almendros Aguilar, Ruiz Córdoba, Fermín Palma, José María Tamayo and Bernardo López are buried.
- From Lugares Míticos de Jaén, in our modest work of making our heritage known and calling for its protection, we demand the restoration of a place that is part of our people’s history and we flatly reject its privatisation.
More about this place…
The San Eufrasio cemetery, known to the people of Jaén as “the old cemetery”, holds 200 years of our city’s history. Many of our neighbours have relatives buried there, and it also holds a mass grave of people shot under the Franco regime. In recent years it has been neglected by one city council after another, and it is now in such a sorry state that in December 2012 it had to be closed because of the danger it posed to visitors. We have recently learnt that the current Jaén city government intends to privatise its management. From Lugares Míticos de Jaén, in our modest work of making our heritage known and calling for its protection, we demand the restoration of a place that is part of our people’s history and we flatly reject its privatisation.
