No more space for the dead in Vizcaya town

SOLANO, Nueva Vizcaya – Not only the living, but even the dead are running out of land here.

For years, cemetery officials in this booming commercial town have been finding it increasingly difficult to find available vacant lots to bury the dead in the century-old public cemetery.

“Thousands of dead have already been buried there that it is difficult to find a place to bury your dead if you don’t have any relatives buried there. It’s difficult to estimate how many have already been buried there through the years,” municipal engineer Nestor Gonzaga said.

With the coming generations in mind, and even though congestion problems in the present cemetery would not immediately be solved, the municipal government recently began work for a new 21,000-square-meter cemetery in a nearby village.

Mayor Philip Dacayo said it has been a traffic nightmare at the 40,000-square-meter public cemetery in Barangay Roxas every All Saints’ Day.

“The town cemetery has become so crowded that in the past, relatives were burying their dead on top of each other,” said Gonzaga.

The site for the new cemetery was bought for P1.5 million in nearby Curifang village, Gonzaga said, adding it would be ready for use next year.

“We are already preparing the cemetery for the coming years, especially with the exceedingly high cost of lots in nearby private cemeteries,” said Dacayo.

He said they foresee the new cemetery to be more like a memorial park, but affordable to the poor.

“We will be charging only a minimal fee for the use of lots in the new cemetery. For only around P1,500, a family could use their cemetery lot for a 10-year period,” he said.

The municipal cemetery is much cheaper than commercial memorial parks here which charge as much as P20,000 for a two-by-four-meter lot, which poor residents can hardly afford.