The cemetery Saint Joseph was inaugurated at Castelló on May 1861.
When it was built, the local authorities decided, very charitably, that the first dead person to be buried there should be an extremely poor one. During days after the completion of the construction, some people died, but they weren’t enough poor and so were buried in the other, older cemetery.
And finally a woman who met the requirements died. To do a great inauguration, it was needed a multitudinous funeral and maybe the deceased woman hadn’t enough relatives and friends. So 50 poor people, recruited from the local House of Mercy, and 18 orphaned children from a school, were brought to take part in the funeral, along with the benevolent local authorities and clergy (www.castelloninformacion.com).
It was 1861. Times have changed, nowadays this story sounds so paternalist and patronizing that only some dumb aristocrat people would think something like that. The Spanish royal family, perhaps?
Photear 