Cementerio de la Almudena

This morning I went for the first time to the Cementerio de la Almudena. I wanted to see the grave of Fernando Casado Arambillet (although maybe you know him better as Fernando Rey). It's about an hour and a half walk across town, up the Calle Alcalá and past the bullring.

Two problems. More people are buried there than currently live in Madrid itself, and there is no directory or map to the graves. I suppose this is good, on the one hand, as it refuses to turn the cemetery into a tourist attraction, but, on the other hand, after walking halfway across the city on a touristy pilgrimage myself, it left me a little nonplussed. Anyway, having set myself a task only slightly easier than finding a specific living human individual in Madrid with no knowledge of where he lives (slightly easier, because, with rare exceptions, the dead stay put), it's no wonder that I drew a blank. You have to know how the system works even after you're dead. I didn't see the grave of Fernando Rey; I didn't even get to see the grave of Benito Pérez Galdos, Pío Baroja or Vicente Aleixandre. But...

There were emptied-out ossuaries, set into the side of a hill that looked suspiciously as if it were crumbling from the weight of bones.


There were spare ossuaries, which are marked as 'restos', a word which I only know as meaning 'leftovers' in a culinary sense.


There were the four towers of the Cuatro Torres Business Area standing happily above the early-ish morning cloud.


There was the tomb of the Flores family, an affront to good monumental taste even in a largely Catholic country. The statues here are of, I think, the actress Lola Flores (1923-1995) (r.), and her son Antonio (1961-1995), who died shortly after his mother's death [the original version of this post claimed that he committed suicide as a result of Lola's death, but - see the comments- that's not certain. He died of an overdose of barbiturates and alcohol a fortnight after his mother's death, but there is no clear indication of whether this was deliberate or not in any of the online sources I can see.]


Here's Antonio singing 'No dudaría':


And here is Lola singing 'Ay pena, penita, pena'


There was also the grave of José Cubero Sánchez, a bullfighter better known as 'El Yiyo'.


More worryingly, there were large and unpleasantly well-kept monuments to La División Azul;


the Condor Legion,


and the Falangists who died at the Cuartel de la Montaña.


I said last week that I guessed the left wing were throwing as much paint at the right-wing memorials as the right wing were throwing at the left-wing ones. But maybe I was wrong. Still, I suppose somebody's keeping score.