The architect wanted to build a monument made of monuments, and the city let him

The largest thing on Montjuïc is not the castle, the museum or the fairground. It is the cemetery on the seaward flank, terraced up the slope above the port, and almost nobody who comes up this hill goes into it.

This page is short on purpose. What it mostly does is tell you which of the famous things about this place we could stand up and which we could not, because on this subject that distinction matters more than usual.

Why it exists

It was inaugurated in 1883, under the mayor Francesc de Paula Rius i Taulet, and built to the direction of Leandre Albareda i Petit, the municipal architect.

The reason, in the cemetery service’s own words: these were times affected by constant epidemics, and the cemetery of Poblenou, the first in the city, was already insufficient.

Note what that sentence does not say. It says constant epidemics. It does not say cholera. Every page that names a specific disease has added it, and we are not going to.

The design ambition is stated too, and it explains the whole shape of the place:

Albareda followed the models of other European cemeteries, such as Père Lachaise in Paris… He wanted to design a monument of monuments.

That is what you are walking through. Not a burial ground with some good tombs in it — a landscape deliberately built as a gallery, terraced down a quarry-scarred hillside above the sea, by a city that had just decided it was going to be a European capital and was five years away from throwing its first world’s fair.

The number, and the number people use instead

Cementiris de Barcelona publishes this:

It has more than 151,000 graves distributed over a total surface of 567,934 m².

You will read, in a great many places, that around a million people are buried here.

No institution publishes that, and no institution publishes a count of people at all. Graves are not people — a family grave holds several, over generations — and turning 151,000 into a million is arithmetic nobody has shown their working for. So we are giving you the figure the city gives, in the unit the city gives it in, and leaving the rounder one alone.

The art, and the one Domènech i Montaner

The cultural-artistic route covers forty graves, and the service describes them as mausoleums and sculptures of high artistic value made by architects and sculptors of the period between 1883 and 1936.

The names it credits are the same names that built the Eixample: Josep Puig i Cadafalch, Eusebi Arnau, Josep Llimona, Enric Clarasó, Manuel Fuxà, Josep Vilaseca, Enric Sagnier, Rossend Nobas, Rafael Atché, Antoni Maria Gallissà, and Albareda himself.

And one detail that is worth the climb on its own. The tomb slab of the Valls i Vicenç family hypogeum was made by Lluís Domènech i Montaner — and the cemetery notes that it is the only funerary work the famous architect made in Barcelona.

The man who built the Palau de la Música and the Hospital de Sant Pau made exactly one grave in this city, and it is up here where nobody goes. If you have read our piece on the other great architect of that generation, that is where this belongs.

While we are naming names: it is Domènech i Montaner. The cemetery does not mention Domènech i Estapà anywhere in its Montjuïc route texts, and the confusion between the two is common enough to be worth stating.

The tomb cut into the quarry

The Batlló hypogeum is the one that ties this page to the rest of the hill.

The cemetery’s description: a project of 1886, the work of Josep Vilaseca, is a monument in Montjuïc stone situated on the landing of the stair. It was excavated into the rock — like the Egyptian hypogea — and was finished in 1889. The angels on the façade are Manuel Fuxà’s; the interior sculpture is Enric Clarasó’s.

So: a tomb made of the hill, cut into the hill, on a hillside that had been quarried for two thousand years to build the city whose dead it now holds. Barcelona did not import a symbol for that. It just carried on digging.

Who is here

Every name below is one the cemetery service names on its own pages, each with a grave location.

Joan Miró — whose foundation is on the same hill. Ildefons Cerdà, who drew the Eixample. Jacint Verdaguer. Isaac Albéniz. Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia. Francesc Macià. Santiago Rusiñol. Àngel Guimerà. Joan Gamper. Francesc Cambó, who commissioned the gardens on the other side of the hill. Montserrat Roig. Carlos Ruiz Zafón. Joan Salvat-Papasseit, Josep Carner, Salvador Seguí, Victoria de los Ángeles. And Lluís Companys, in the Fossar de la Pedrera, which is inside this same cemetery.

One distinction to hold on to, because this hill invites the mistake. Being buried here is not the same as having died here. Several people whose graves are in this cemetery are routinely and wrongly described as having been executed at the castle at the top of it — Salvador Puig Antich among them. He is not one of the castle’s dead. The castle’s own history names who was, and it is a specific and shorter list than the one that circulates.

The precincts at the edge

The cemetery service records something about its own founding that most nineteenth-century cemeteries would rather not have written down:

A space was also reserved at the edge of the cemetery to fit out a precinct for Christians of other confessions and another precinct for free-thinkers (spiritualists, freemasons, atheists, etc.).

At the edge. In 1883, in a Catholic city, that was both an accommodation and a boundary, and the phrasing preserves both. Today the cemetery also has an Espai Interconviccional at the lower entrance.

There is no Jewish plot documented in this cemetery, and this is where a very common confusion lives. The medieval Jewish necropolis on Montjuïc is an entirely separate site, centuries earlier and on the other side of the hill.

Two corrections to what this page used to say about it. We gave the excavation as 1949, following a page of the castle’s website; the city’s archaeology service dates the campaign to October 1945 – April 1946, with 171 tombs, and a second campaign in 2001 that located 557 more — of which only 28 were excavated. And we called the hill’s name an open question; the Generalitat’s listing decree says the burial ground dóna nom a la muntanya de Montjuïc. The whole thing, including where the gravestones ended up, is the Jewish necropolis of Montjuïc. It has nothing to do with the municipal cemetery of 1883.

The hearses

An oddity, and the sort of thing that is either wonderful or not depending on you: the Col·lecció de Carrosses Fúnebres, the collection of funeral carriages.

It was inaugurated in 1970, lived for four decades in the basement of the service’s headquarters in Poblenou, and in June 2012 was moved to the new installation at Montjuïc cemetery. Thirteen original carriages, six accompanying vehicles and three motor vehicles.

If you have read that it moved to Collserola, that is backwards. It moved here.

What we could not stand up

The Kiss of Death. There is a sculpture people come here specifically to find, and it is absent from the cemetery’s own page, from all three of its Montjuïc route texts, from its funerary-art exhibition page and from its index of illustrious burials. No author. No date. Nothing.

We are not going to give you the sculptor and the year that every other page gives you, because we could not find an institution that gives them either. If you want to see it, it is there. What it is by and when is a question this city has not answered in writing.

The route names. There is no Ruta d’Art Funerari and no Camí del cel. Those strings do not exist on the service’s site. The real names are Ruta Cultural Artística, Històrica and Combinada, plus funerary botany, ancient Egypt and sport.

A published visitor code. The service charter publishes duties for grave-concession holders, not etiquette for visitors. So the guidance below is ours, not the city’s.

Going

It is on the seaward flank, above the port, and the routes are free and self-guided, delivered by QR codes in the cemetery itself. The municipal service also runs guided visits, which it lists in its published service charter. We are not printing times.

Three things, and they are ours rather than the city’s.

It is a working cemetery. People are visiting relatives on a Tuesday afternoon in August. Photograph the architecture, not the graves with flowers on them.

Give it a full hour or do not start. It is terraced, it is steep, and forty graves spread over fifty-six hectares is a walk, not a stroll.

Do not attach it to the Fossar as one visit. The Fossar de la Pedrera is inside the same cemetery and it is a different thing entirely — a worked-out quarry used as a common grave until 1979, and a memorial since 1985. Doing both in one afternoon is possible and it is a lot.

Where it sits on the hill

Our Montjuïc walking tour goes to the Fossar and not to the cemetery around it, because two and a half hours already covers the fairground and the castle and the argument between them.

The cemetery is the visit to make on your own, on a second trip, when you have the time to be slow — coming back to Barcelona is largely a list of places like this. It is also, by any measure, one of the parts of the city its visitors do not reach: see non-touristy things to do in Barcelona, and is Montjuïc worth it for the honest version of how much hill you can do in one afternoon.

This is not the only burial ground on the hill, nor the oldest. The medieval Jewish necropolis, on the north-eastern slope, is documented from 1091 and is a listed historic place — and it is the reason the mountain is called what it is.