Thousands of Spanish corpses face eviction

with rental payments on their burial plots.

A total of 7 000 people laid to rest in the Torrero municipal graveyard, in the northern city of Zaragoza, face being dug up and reburied in common ground.

City officials have started warning relatives and caretakers of the sites that they should pay up or face eviction – by placing stickers on the sites whose leases are up. Torrero, like many Spanish cemeteries, no longer allows people to buy grave sites. It instead leases them out for periods of five or 49 years. In many cases the leases have run out because relatives – or caretakers – have died themselves, or moved house and failed to renew the contract. – Journal Gazettee.