Huesca Cemetery

Huesca Cemetery sits along the old road to Zaragoza, on Avenida del Doctor Artero, and has served as the city's active municipal burial ground for nearly ninety years. Beyond its everyday role, the site stands as one of the most significant physical witnesses to the dramatic history of Huesca during the Spanish Civil War.

Why was the cemetery moved to its current site?

The earlier municipal cemetery, known as Las Mártires, was established in the 19th century and served the city for decades until it became too small for a growing population. A new cemetery was laid out along the road to Zaragoza, on the site still in use today. The grounds were enclosed by a brick perimeter wall, and numerous trees were planted that have since grown into dense, shaded vegetation lining the paths and graves.

How did the current cemetery's history begin?

Burials at the present cemetery began on September 3, 1936, with Silveria Montes Pardo recorded as the first interment. That date is no coincidence: just days earlier, on August 23, 1936, at least ninety-five people were executed against the wall of the former municipal cemetery on the Zaragoza road — one of the darkest days in the city's modern history. The outbreak of the civil war and the executions that followed made the previous burial site untenable, especially once it was briefly occupied by Republican forces, so burials were shifted to the Mártires hill, where the current cemetery stands.

From September 1936 until March 1938, when the Republican siege of the city ended, more than 1,238 burials were recorded. Between September 1936 and June 1937 alone, roughly 850 burials took place, and due to lack of space, some individual niches held between two and four bodies. The cemetery's western outer wall was the site of numerous executions carried out from 1936 until as late as 1945. A memorial near the cemetery today lists 548 names of those executed both at the wall and at other locations across the city.

What does the cemetery look like today?

Today's cemetery combines several forms of burial: ground-level graves marked with stone crosses, wall niches, and family tombs. The grounds include a chapel used for final services and a small parking area near the entrance for visitors. Over its long operational history, the cemetery has seen repeated exhumations and transfers of remains, a common pattern for necropolises with such a layered past.

The wider area around Huesca also holds traces of much older burial practices. In the second half of the 1980s, excavations in the gardens along Avenida Martínez de Velasco uncovered the oldest known necropolis in the city — a cremation cemetery used for roughly five hundred years, from the Iron Age into the early Roman period, where the ashes of the dead were placed in small ceramic urns.

Frequently asked questions

Where is the Huesca cemetery located? It lies on Avenida del Doctor Artero, along the old road connecting Huesca and Zaragoza.

When was the current cemetery established? Burials began on September 3, 1936, after the previous municipal cemetery could no longer meet the city's needs.

Why is the cemetery linked to the Spanish Civil War? Because of the executions carried out at its wall between 1936 and 1945, and the mass burials of conflict victims during its earliest years of operation.