On July 19, 1823, 36 years after King Charles III Forbidden by Royal Order burials in churches, was officially blessed by the Vicar and Beneficiary of the parish of La Concepción de La Orotava Domingo Curras Abreu the Catholic Cemetery of the Villa of La Orotava. The cemetery was already in those years a pressing need in the townto the extent that both the churches and the hermitages no longer gave enough to undertake so many burials and the two provisional cemeteries that were urgently created in 1816 (in the demolished church of San Francisco) and 1821 (in the suppressed convent of the fathers Augustinians) did not help to solve the problem.
For years and as was the custom in all places, the faithful were buried in the churches, and in the case of La Orotava they began to be buried first in the Church of La Concepción, not in vain its curacy dates from 1503, but it soon became He also began to bury in all the convents and hermitages of the municipality.
The fact that La Orotava has taken so long to have a permanent cemetery, despite the RO of Carlos III, does not make it different from the rest of the municipalities of the Islands, given that, as Francisco José Galante points out in his book Los Cementerios: otra reading de la bourgeois city, “in the Canary Islands those royal provisions were violated on multiple occasions”, according to him, the construction of said cemeteries being based on a provision issued by the Royal Court in 1807. This law together with the hygienic improvements “that were projected before the continuous outbreaks of epidemics caused the rapid construction of cemeteries. An example of this is that cemeteries like the one in Santa Cruz de Tenerife or the one in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria began to be built in 1811, a date also far removed from the RO of Carlos III, like the one in La Laguna, which in 1807 and at the request of the parish priest of Los Remedios Pedro José Bencomo blessed its provisional cemetery.
Other cases are even more striking, since municipalities such as Vilaflor de Chasna, which buried its parishioners both in the church of San Pedro and in the Augustinian convent of San Juan, continued to bury in said convent until 1901. Valverde, in El Hierro, blessed its cemetery in December 1868. Santa Cruz de La Palma began to build it in 1874, and the one in Arico dates from 1925.
But despite all this, La Orotava could have been the first Canarian municipality to have a municipal cemetery, given that as Antonio Luque Hernández comments in his book La Orotava, heart of Tenerife, “the first municipal necropolis project for La Orotava It dates from the year 1790, and was the work of Lieutenant Colonel Juan Antonio de Urtusaústegui y Lugo, who decided to place it in the vicinity of the new temple of Nuestra Señora de la Concepción”. But unfortunately it was not carried out, “because of the great inconveniences that this site presented”.
As we have already pointed out, in La Orotava burials were carried out in the parish of La Concepción, but when the health problems began in it due to the high number of burials, burials had to be carried out both in hermitages and in convents, in order to release some pressure on the parish church. The first places used were the convents of San Francisco and San Nicolás Obispo, run by Catalina nuns of the Order of Santo Domingo. But very soon the rest of the convents and the hermitages of San Roque and San Sebastián and, above all, that of San Juan (converted into a parish in 1681) joined them.
At the end of the 17th century, La Orotava had five convents, three for men and two for women: that of San Lorenzo for Franciscan friars, that of San Benito for Dominicans, that of San José for Clarisas nuns of the Second Order of Saint Francis, that of San Nicolás Obispo, owned by the Catalina nuns of Santo Domingo, and that of Nuestra Señora de Gracia, owned by Augustinian parents, all of them being used to a greater or lesser extent as a burial place, and not only for the patrons of the chapels, but also for the town itself. general. And in addition, it also had several hermitages and the Hospital de la Santísima Trinidad, which also became burial places. The latter, for example, buried the corpse of the 21-year-old young man from El Hierro, Pedro Machín, on May 17, 1690, who had died in said health center.
PARISH OF SAN JOHN
During the 18th century, and once the hermitage of San Juan was converted into a parish, its faithful were buried in said titular church, except for sporadic cases in which the burials were carried out both in the convent of San Francisco and Santo Domingo. and even as in 1711 and 1712, and sporadically, in the parish of La Concepción itself. But generally they were all in San Juan, a church that in the middle of that century had 14 rows of tombs that were located in the main nave. The situation continued the same in said parish church during the 19th century until on June 2, 1816, the provisional cemetery was blessed on a plot of land adjacent to the Franciscan convent.
PARISH OF THE CONCEPTION
The case of the parish of La Concepción was very similar to that of San Juan during the first half of the 18th century, since the faithful were mainly being buried in their own church, although from the second half of the century burials began in other churches, such as those of the convents of Gracia or San Nicolás, reaching the end of said century to be buried more outside of La Concepción than in it, highlighting Santo Domingo and San Lorenzo as the most used places, although without ignoring San Agustín and Trinity Hospital.
It is necessary to remember that this century was very important for the church of La Concepción, not in vain and due to the unfortunate state in which it was left after the earthquakes of the Güímar volcano, it had to be demolished in 1768, to rise again in its current state. setting. During the 19th century, burials in the parish church increased again, until in October 1812 they once again decided to bury outside it, although only until July of the following year. La Concepción also buried its faithful in the provisional cemetery installed by the court next to the convent of San Francisco.
THE CONSTRUCTION
Although the publication of the Cortes Decree of November 1813 once again encouraged La Orotava to build a permanent cemetery that would alleviate the unsanitary problems that were suffering in its churches and hermitages, it would not be until August 1817 when they began to take the first steps in this direction. On that date, a commission was created within the Superior Board of Health that chose some land belonging to the Marquis of Torrehermosa as suitable for the construction of the cemetery, beginning to carry out the works, despite the scarcity of municipal resources. But due first to problems with the legitimacy and value of said land and, later, to the lack of financial resources to carry out the works, they were delayed for several years. As we have seen, the situation in October 1821 was unsustainable and both the parishes of La Concepción and that of San Juan did not allow more burials in their churches.
As Juan Alejandro Lorenzo Lima points out in his work A forgotten facet of Fernando Estévez. His work as an urban planner in La Orotava, one of the great ballasts for raising funds for the cemetery was the lack of financial support from the Concepción benefit. As we have already mentioned, said church was used by both parishes since the 17th century to accommodate more burials, but the situation was already unsustainable, and burials ceased from the month of March of that year, 1823.
At the beginning of July, while the parish of San Juan buried in San Agustín and that of La Concepción did so in the hermitage of San Sebastián, despite both already presenting high levels of unsanitary conditions, the City Council, given the urgency to open said cemetery, It was agreed “without wasting time, we proceed to put up the provisional gate that has already been made and enclose the cemetery at the height of two rods in its entirety.” A few days later, the definitive closure of San Agustín and San Sebastián obliges the cemetery to be blessed and to order the first burial to be held that same day in said cemetery. But, despite the fact that with the blessing of the cemetery it was thought that the problems would cease, it did not, since the Marquis of Torrehermosa filed a complaint with the City Council for “the place through which one had to enter to bury the corpses in the same cemetery… he goes through the front of the back of his house where he says he planned to build a playground”.
At the end of 1823, the Orotava cemetery was completed, built according to the project of Fernando Estévez, finally relieving the pressure of the burials on the churches and hermitages of the Villa. Fernando Estévez (1788-1854) is one of the most important artists of the Canarian context of the 19th century and not only because of his facet as an image maker, but also because of his multifaceted character given his work as altarpiece artist, painter, urban planner and goldsmith.
in question
The Catholic Cemetery of La Orotava was declared by the Nivarian bishopric as a desecrated or questionable place, for allowing the burial of José Nicolás Hernández, a member of the Orotava Masonic lodge Taoro nº 90, who died in La Orotava in November 1878. Said cemetery He was declared in question by judgment of December 23 of that year. And the situation worsened even more, when the burial of another Freemason, the VIII Marquis of the Quinta Roja Diego Ponte y del Castillo, was allowed shortly after, despite the refusal of the parish priest of Concepción José Borges Acosta. This caused the cemetery to remain a desecrated place for more than 26 years, time that the bishopric needed to decide to lift “the interdict that weighs on the Catholic Cemetery of La Orotava.” (For more information, see Freemasonry and Intolerance in the Canary Islands: The case of the Marquesado de la Quinta Roja” by Nicolás G. Lemus and José M. Rodríguez Maza)
As we have seen, since the first years of the cemetery’s operation, a place has been required for those who die outside the Catholic communion. That is, and according to Canon Law for members of heretical or schismatic sects such as Freemasons and the like; excommunicated; suicidal; public sinners, and even those who had their corpse burned, unless they had given some sign of repentance. In addition, according to the Concordat of 1851, no type of impediment will be placed on prelates or ministers of the Church in the exercise of their functions. And this, added to the generalized conflict over the ownership of the cemeteries and who should have the key to the enclosure, although the ecclesiastical authority or the town halls, caused numerous problems. In 1904 the question was lifted when the Bishop recognized that it could not be proven that the Marquis was a Freemason and given that, as the mayor had notified him, the remains of José Nicolás Hernández “who were buried in the Catholic Cemetery but separated by a fence made of wood without any religious sign, were transferred years ago to the general ossuary due to the need to remove different times the land it occupied for the burial of other corpses”.
But this situation did not only occur in La Orotava. For example, the two cemeteries of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, that of San Rafael and San Roque and that of Santa Lastenia, were also sanctioned by the bishopric. The first, in 1913, for burying an unbaptized child and then allowing the grave not to be fenced off with a wooden fence, as required by law. What happened in Santa Lastenia was even more serious, because even without blessing, corpses were already being buried without notifying the Church and allowing “Catholics, non-Catholics and suicide bombers” to be buried. Another example is that of Tazacorte, whose parish priest informed the bishopric in 1939 of the fact that the corpse of Manuel Lorenzo Gómez was buried without his consent, whom he considered did not deserve ecclesiastical burial.
