A cemetery surrounded by life and not by the dead: this is the cemetery of Costa da Morte, or Coast of Death. Designed by the architect César Portela (Pontevedra, 1937), an excellent landscape designer who had relations with Tenerife two decades ago, in the time of Adán Martín, and was linked to designs on Isla Baja, Tenerife.
The cemetery was built 25 years ago and was never finished. It only broke its solitude once during a brief period in which a pilgrim was installed in one of its blocks.
It is that corner of the Costa da Morte that looks towards the sea, the earth and the sky, full of earthly and spiritual magnetism, where calm and silence meet the rhythms of living nature: next to it, the waves of the sea they beat mercilessly against the cliffs; the birds fly over with their trills, and, on occasions, humanity also arrives sometimes through the murmurs of people who walk along that beautiful coastline of northern Spain. Of course, one of the places that the writer chooses, without hesitation, to rest for all eternity, when that moment arrives. The pity is that it is not on a coast in the north of Tenerife.
The non-existent cemetery
In the middle of this idyllic wild and authentic scenery stands the unique cemetery. A graveyard more dead than it deserves. Dead after all, although not because of the bodies that inhabit it, but precisely because of its non-existence.
Portela himself writes on his website that when he was commissioned to design the cemetery “the first thing he wanted was to offer the dead the rest they deserve in a sublime place where architecture was capable of merging positively with nature.” The intention of that project that started in 1997 —when so many marvelous projects started from that Spain full of Illusion recently entered the European Union—, still remains unfinished to this day, Portela wanted to configure an open landscape from several blocks of granite that housed up to 12 niches inside, all of them located in scale on a beautiful and irregular hillside with views of Mount Pindus and the sea.
modern concept
“I wanted to create a cemetery with a modern concept, which did not depend exclusively on the Catholic Church, but would give satisfaction to everyone, because here there were more and more people from abroad with other religions,” says Portela. Of course, its modernity generated some controversies, polemics, voices both in favor and detractors, but without money or will policy —and with the Church also against it—, the reality of creating a cemetery at the end of the world gradually faded until it became a utopia.
In those nineties, so wonderful that our country lived in general, the local government sought to build a new civil cemetery for the town of Finisterre and, following his architectural philosophy, César Portela conceived that space in a free way, without walls or enclosures that defined no kind of limit: simply a graveyard surrounded by life. «When it was decided that this would be the site, I told the city council that what is not appropriate there is to delimit it with a wall like all cemeteries, but rather that the walls of this cemetery had to be the slope of the mountain, the sea and the sky”, recalls the architect. “The cemetery had the possibility of growing depending on the needs,” he adds. Now the granite blocks that were once built are scattered along a network of paths that is badly damaged – and today almost impassable – that stretches along the cliffs with the ocean and nature as a backdrop.
«The topography, the silence, the absence and the memory, are the inspirers and the protagonists of this project. Architecture is the result, almost a consequence”, writes the architect in his book Finisterre Cemetery.
admired work
In that place where it seems that the Galician dead do not want to end their days, and I do not understand why, the most paradoxical thing is that Portela’s project has become one of the most admired works of contemporary Spanish architecture. Things that life has and that remind me of the case of the process, enormous in years and efforts, of the ravine and park around the Drago de Icod in Tenerife.
The modern necropolis of Portela has been a finalist for awards such as the Philippe Rotthier, in 2002, or the Mies Van der Rohe Award just one year later. It was also described by the English Royal House as “one of the best funerary works in the world”, although this would put it fallow. But it is relevant that it has been mentioned and reviewed in hundreds of specialized and prestigious architectural publications throughout the world.
Currently, the Finisterre cemetery is kept waiting for the ashes of the first who want to rest looking at the sea to arrive and, later, for nature to end up assuming the place as its own.
