Ciriego Cemetery: A Museum By The Sea

A cemetery is not a place of death, but a garden of memory.
– Rainer Maria Rilke

In the slow flow of human history, where memory settles in places and death becomes architecture, we find the origin of the Ciriego Cemetery in Santander, on the Cantabrian Sea. This space of silence has its roots in the Royal Decree issued on April 3, 1787, by Charles III, which stipulated that burial grounds must be located outside city walls. It was a political and hygienic decision, but also a symbolic act: to separate life from death, while still recognizing their intimate coexistence.

However, as often happens in the tension between law and reality, its implementation in Santander was delayed. Until 1820, burials mainly took place in the Cathedral and in the Convent of San Francisco—sacred places that held the dead in the very heart of the living city. But population growth and a new hygienic awareness led to the creation of the San Fernando Cemetery, located on the Calzadas Altas (now Calle Alta). That site, now lost, remained active until the early decades of the 20th century.

The real turning point came in 1881, when architect Casimiro Pérez de la Riva designed the project for the Ciriego Municipal Cemetery, one of his most significant works. The following year, in 1882, he drafted a report titled "Memoria referente a la construcción de un Nuevo Cementerio en la ciudad de Santander", in which every space of the future necropolis was described in detail, as if he were drawing a map of eternity.

On September 3, 1885, Ciriego opened its gates to mystery and rest.

 

In a cemetery, all graves face eternity.
— Fabrizio Caramagna

Pérez de la Riva chose a cruciform layout for the organization of space, as the cross represented Christian redemption, but also offered a practical and expandable structure. The arms of the cross could extend like time, like memory stretching beyond the flesh.

To this day, the cross structure remains preserved in the cemetery’s central area. The necropolis is composed of streets and pathways that create funerary blocks: each of these encloses the plots belonging to individual families. A city of the dead, a silent mirror of the city of the living.

In 1998, a crematorium was built, designed by Emilio Diego Ruisánchez. Although created over a century later, it had already been envisioned in the original plan. Pérez de la Riva, ahead of his time, wrote:

A clear-sighted vision, viewing death not as a taboo, but as a physical and spiritual process to be approached with awareness.

 

Cemeteries are the most silent and honest cities humankind has ever built.
– Honoré de Balzac

Ciriego is not only a place of burial. It is also a stone archive, an open-air museum, where the memory of Santander’s families is etched in marble and bronze. Some mausoleums and pantheons, designed by renowned architects, stand out for their beauty and grandeur. Many are well preserved; others, sadly, lie in neglect, despite being precious witnesses of cultural and social history.

Starting in 2005, the year Santander celebrated the 250th anniversary of its elevation to city status, Professor Carmen Bermejo Lorenzo of the University of Oviedo launched a historical-artistic study of Santander’s cemeteries. In this work, funerary art is analyzed not only for its aesthetic value but also as an expression of the culture of death.

In 2007, thanks to a project signed in collaboration with Cementerio Jardín de Cantabria S.A., a Master Plan was initiated under Bermejo’s coordination. The plan included a complete inventory of the artistic heritage within the cemetery, the creation of catalog records, the establishment of protection categories, and regulations for the preservation of existing heritage and new constructions. The aim was twofold: to understand in order to preserve, and to identify in order to protect.

Thus, Ciriego today is not only a place of endings but also a space of time, memory, and collective identity—a place where art becomes a form of remembrance, and where stone takes on meaning.

 

To stroll through a cemetery is to read the collective novel of a people.
– José Saramago

Those who approach Ciriego with a thoughtful gaze and contemplative spirit cannot help but pause before its extraordinary pantheons: Arechavala, Cué, Cué Fernández, Fernández Bravo, Pardo de Santayana, Hedilla, García Quintanilla, González Torre, Haro, Junco, Marín García, Martínez de las Heras, Meana, the Victims of the Machichaco disaster, Prieto Lavín, and many others. Each one tells a story; each is a carved page in the book of the city.

In Ciriego, death is not absence, but a profound expression of being. A place where time is suspended, and generations speak through the silence of tombs.