Poblenou Cemetery

Historic · El Poblenou (Sant Martí)Barcelona,Spain

Barcelona's first burial ground outside the walls, streets of stacked niches and merchant tombs, one of them carrying a winged skeleton kissing a dying man.

Poblenou Cemetery holds a winged skeleton bending to kiss a dying young man on the forehead. The sculpture sits on the tomb of a textile manufacturer and is dated 1930. Nothing marks it out: it stands in an ordinary row of family graves, and you will walk past it unless you know where to turn. Around it the cemetery reads as a small town — paved lanes between walls of stacked graves, marble angels, broken columns and portrait medallions, the taste of a nineteenth-century merchant city spending money on death. This was the first burial ground Barcelona opened outside its walls. Graves packed into church floors and yards had become a public health problem, so in 1775 the city put its dead out here on empty land. French troops destroyed the place in 1813. An Italian architect, Antonio Ginesi, rebuilt it, and the new cemetery was consecrated in 1819, laid out as streets of niches stacked several storeys high with family tombs and chapels along the main avenues. That layout is still what you walk through.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Ask for the plan at the gate — the famous sculpture carries no sign and stands in a normal row of family tombs, and people spend an hour walking the wrong avenues looking for it.
This is a working cemetery — funerals happen and relatives visit, so keep your voice down, stay off the tombs, and do not set up a tripod or fly anything.
Morning is when the marble works — the sculpture faces into a narrow lane and stands in shade for most of the day, so late arrivals photograph a grey shape rather than a white one.
Read the niche walls, not just the monuments — the stacked drawers carry photographs, hand-painted tiles and objects left by families, and they say more about the city than the sculpture does.

Things to do

1
Hunt down the Kiss of Death yourself
Work towards the section marked on the plan, then slow right down and look at chest height rather than up. The figure is life-size, white, and set against an ordinary wall of tombs. Standing directly in front of it, notice that the young man's face is turned away, so the kiss is landing on a forehead rather than a mouth.
2
Follow one avenue of niches to its end
Pick a lane of stacked graves and follow it the whole way. Photographs, plastic flowers, football badges and hand-painted tiles accumulate along it, and near the far end you will usually find one of the tall wheeled ladders parked where a family left it. This is what almost everybody in the cemetery actually has.
3
Look up at the sculpted tombs on the main avenue
The wide central lanes carry the merchant families: draped mourners, broken columns, doors into rock, angels leaning on urns. Read three or four of them in a row and the changes in taste across a century show plainly, from stiff neoclassical grief to loose, dramatic figures of the 1900s.