Cemetery of Barcelona

The Cemetery of Barcelona is located on the Montjuïch. There, in one of the rocky slopes, there are around 1 million buried people. The main cemetery of Barcelona was open in 1883. It was the consequence of the growing of that city that since early 19th C. went through the industrialisation and with it the demographic growth. At that time Barcelona reassured its central position in the Principality of Catalonia, as well as turning into the locomotive of Spain. The new cemetery was a second push to a movement calling for more hygiene and secularisation, bringing burial places away from the city centre and becoming city owned.

The modernisation of societies in the industrial countries came hand by hand with a renovation of the arts. The always present classicism was displaced by a new regard to the gothic art, the discovering of exotic worlds as Egypt and Mesopotamia, together with the awe for a new free passionate spirit of those touched by Nature. As a synthesis of that new artistic trend we find a Line, the crack of whip and the style generated by it was called Art-Noveau. In Catalonia, that style, called Modernisme in Catalan language, became very popular and even landed into so rare place as the cemetery.

[http://www.thegardenoftheangels.blogspot.com Essay about Barcelona's graveyard]