Another 120 new niches will guarantee the capacity of the Orihuela cemetery until 2027 | The truth

The Orihuela cemetery will not remain small. The cemetery is already preparing a new expansion with a gallery of 120 niches. The management, as LA VERDAD has been able to confirm, hopes to begin processing the license by the end of this year. The objective is that the cemetery is no longer on the ropes. Already in May 2023, the construction of a gallery was completed, with which the capacity for more burials is guaranteed until the end of 2025. The objective would now be to be able to breathe easy until 2027.

“These are works that are carried out progressively as needed,” explains the cemetery manager, José Miguel Hernández. The Orihuela cemetery is registering around 275 burials each year in niches, of which a large part are in new niches. “We need to have about 300 every two years,” he estimates.

A rhythm of burials that, however, still does not alleviate the alternative of columbaria. The much smaller niches to house the funerary vessels of those deceased who opt for cremation are still fewer than those requiring conventional burial. Last year, in the Oriolano cemetery, there were 45 deceased who opted for this modality for which, Hernández points out, they do have much more capacity. “It is an option that is now on the rise.”

Starting in the first decade of this century, the cemetery, property of the Diocese of Orihuela-Alicante, had to process the acquisition of new land and surpass its old boundaries. Currently its expansion area is located behind a furniture factory and next to the foothills of the mountains. Hernández explains that part of those lands were already his and the rest were acquired by exchange from the Generalitat Valenciana. As he explains, the Bishopric obtained approximately 25,000 square meters in that exchange in exchange for other lands “of much larger size” in the heart of the Sierra de Mariola natural park, in Alcoy.

At the same time, the cemetery is also making investments to repair the oldest galleries, since the cemetery is one of the oldest in the region, founded in 1806. In this sense, there have been galleries that, after recording collapses and landslides, have been had to be torn down and rebuilt, while others are to be restored.