Strabo said that a squirrel could cross the Iberian Peninsula jumping from tree to tree. Today the valid image would be this: someone could explain the recent history of Spain jumping from traffic circle to traffic circle.
The one in Villanueva de la Cañada has grass, asphalt, a crosswalk and 119 graves. What it also has is something difficult to find in any other city in the world: a cemetery inside a traffic circle. It is called Cemetery of Christ, although probably not even the neighbors themselves would know how to locate it with that name. For them it is simply the cemetery traffic circle. Or the cemetery of the traffic circle. Depending on how you look at it.
Why is a traffic circle installed in a cemetery?
Actually, the story is less fanciful than it sounds. The cemetery was inaugurated in 1933, when Villanueva de la Cañada was little more than a dot on the map. In the 2000s, when the municipality began to expand without much urban development control – like all of metropolitan Madrid in that decade – the city grew around the cemetery.
The solution was practical, functional and strange in equal parts: the road surrounded it and turned it into a traffic circle.
But this is not just any traffic circle. The first zebra crossing that crossed a traffic circle in Spain was installed here. And the neighbors still use it to leave flowers. That is to say: it is a traffic circle, but also a place of mourning. It is a public space and a sacred precinct. It is the perfect cross between urban logistics and collective memory.
Since 2002 no one is buried. The City Council contemplates dismantling the 119 graves and 14 niches that are still flanked by traffic, according to a report in El Pais dating from 2021. But that is a “long term goal”, as is often said when it is not known if it will happen.
Madrid and its mortuary relationship
Madrid is a necropolis. I do not say so, the evidence says so. Where today is the florist’s shop El Ángel del Jardín, in the center of the city, were the bones of Lope de Vega. Wakes were held at the Ateneo. And in any street downtown -from Lavapiés to Malasaña- remains have been found. As the journalist Nieves Concostrina wrote, it is hard to call things by their name.
It is hard to say “cemetery” or “burial” without softening it with less emphatic words. But this is what it is: a city -and which one isn’t? – built on its dead. And a traffic circle that sums it all up.