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Cementiri de Poblenou

Cementiri de Montjuïc is the grand, operatic resting place of Barcelona’s dead. Cementiri de Poblenou is the intimate rehearsal—the quieter, humbler predecessor that never quite stopped working. We came here for one thing, the Kiss of Death, and stayed because the whole place felt unexpectedly alive.

 

Poblenou sits marooned in the middle of the 22@ tech district, surrounded by glass towers, tram lines, and traffic that never sleeps. The city didn’t plan around it; it just grew up and over it, like ivy made of Wi-Fi.

 

The traffic hum fades fast once you step through the gates. You trade glass offices for marble angels, start-ups for statuary. The cemetery’s grid unfolds like a rational city plan, all straight lines and symmetry, a holdover from the Enlightenment idea that even death should be orderly.

 

This was Barcelona’s first municipal cemetery, built in 1775 when health officials finally banned burials inside church walls. It didn’t last. Napoleon’s troops flattened it in 1813, and the city rebuilt it six years later under architect Antonio Ginesi. He gave it logic—a central axis, colonnades, walled niches, and family mausoleums that look more like chapels than graves. Poblenou became the model of a hygienic, modern resting place—death as civic infrastructure.

 

It also became a status symbol. The lower walls are stacked with thousands of small burial niches, rented by the decade, each sealed with a plaque and a handful of flowers. When a lease ends without renewal, the remains are quietly moved to an ossuary, and the niche goes back on the market—mortality with a business plan.

 

Meanwhile, the central avenues are lined with marble showpieces—domed family chapels guarded by angels, obelisks rising like punctuation marks, pavilions draped in grief-stricken figures. One is surmounted by a towering Celtic cross —monolithic, defiant, impossible to ignore. Class structure didn’t stop at the gates here. It was immortalized in carved stone.

 

By the late 1800s, the city had outgrown even this. Barcelona’s population exploded with industry, and space for the dead ran out. Montjuïc Cemetery opened in 1883, vast and theatrical, taking over the heavy lifting. Poblenou settled into semi-retirement.

 

Or so I thought—until I noticed some new flowers and a couple of clearly modern graves. People are still being buried here. Between the neoclassical angels and rusting fences, fresh bouquets mark recently sealed niches. Names from the 2020s share space with 19th-century traders and priests. It feels strange and oddly comforting that the city keeps evolving, but some families keep coming back to the same address.

 

The Kiss of Death sits near the back, impossible to miss once you know what you’re looking for. A marble skeleton with wings—half angel, half reaper—leans over a young man and presses its lips to his forehead. It’s terrifying and tender, which probably explains why it’s become a local legend and the cemetery’s most photographed resident. The sculptor was Jaume Barba, or maybe Joan Fontbernat, records disagree. The inscription below quotes the poet Jacint Verdaguer, “The young man’s heart stopped—faith was rewarded.” I’m not sure it was faith that drew me here, but I stood longer than I meant to. It is magnificent. Makes me rethink my whole cremation concept.

 

The artistry throughout the cemetery is equally theatrical, if less famous. Marble youths with bouquets frozen in their hands. Solemn busts of parents who must’ve terrified their children. Angels caught mid-flight, eternally stuck between heaven and paperwork. Iron fences bloom with rust, weeds poke through stone borders, and the city’s skyline glints just beyond the walls. Poblenou is both preserved and forgotten, like a stage set left standing after the performance moved uptown.

 

The design still stuns. Long corridors of stacked tombs stretch away like apartment blocks for the afterlife, each niche personalized with photos, plastic flowers, and the occasional LED candle. The effect is weirdly urban—a vertical city of the dead facing its own identical twin across a sun-bleached avenue. You could mistake it for public housing if not for the dates.

 

The city’s noise crashes back in when you leave the front gate—buses, scooters, espresso machines. Poblenou isn’t just hemmed in by the city—it’s surrounded by it, swallowed whole, but holding its ground. A stubborn square of silence in the middle of massive modern ambition.


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