Lapa Cemetery is the oldest operating private Catholic cemetery in Portugal,
founded in 1833 by the Lapa brotherhood.
About the cemetery
Founded in 1833 by the Lapa brotherhood, the Lapa Cemetery is the oldest
operating private Catholic cemetery in Portugal, established two years
before the Portuguese law on public cemeteries. Initially, it functioned
provisionally on a plot of land at the back of its church, with the first
burial in the definitive cemetery occurring in 1836. The main construction
efforts, spearheaded by businessman João da Silva Ribeiro, took place
between 1836 and 1840, and the cemetery was consecrated by 1838.
Due to its strong social acceptance, particularly among the wealthier
population, the cemetery saw rapid growth. A little over ten years later,
the need for expansion arose, and the cemetery was enlarged. Two decades
later the cemetery had to be enlarged again and the works were concluded in
1874. The entrance gate was then moved from its original place to where it
is today.
Even though it is not a large cemetery, the Lapa Cemetery holds immense
historical and artistic significance, particularly in northern Portugal.
Some of the first Portuguese romanticist funerary monuments were erected
here from 1839 onwards. Several of its most pompous tombs served as
inspiration for other cemeteries over the decades. In fact, from its
establishment until the end of the 19th century, the Lapa Cemetery was the
favourite burial place of the Porto elite.
The establishment of the cemetery is also linked to the important military
event of the Siege of Porto (1832-1833), which played a crucial role in the
transition to a constitutional monarchy. Notably, the king responsible for
this change, Pedro IV, donated his heart to the city, and a monument inside
the church next to the cemetery houses this heart, making the entire complex
a highly relevant historical site.
Today, the Lapa cemetery attracts many local and foreign visitors.
Guided tours, events, and school visits are being organised at the cemetery.
Cemetery architectural and landscape design
The cemetery was designed as a sort of "campo santo", with the central plots
for monuments in the form of pedestals, obelisks, or others, and the edges
for vault-chapels, which thus enclose the space. However, unlike the typical
Italian "campo santo" with porticoes and the most important tombs beneath
them, in the Lapa cemetery the construction of the vault-chapels on the
edges of the cemetery was left to the discretion of the wealthiest families,
resulting in a lack of uniformity and, at the same time, a greater diversity
in architectural and iconographic terms. This model of cemetery landscape,
which was first applied in Portugal precisely in the Lapa cemetery, was then
adopted in dozens of other cemeteries in the northern part of the country.
However, the extensions made to the Lapa cemetery in the 1850s and 1870s did
not follow this model: in the upper division of the cemetery, monuments are
all in rows, with no intervening paths, and may be small chapels or take on
other types (this type of layout is an originality of the cemetery and is
not found in any other cemetery in Portugal); in the third division, which
corresponds to the final enlargement of the cemetery, monuments are aligned
with the streets, as is the case in the two large municipal cemeteries in
Porto. Eventually, this final model would also contaminate the oldest part
of the cemetery.
By 1910 the cemetery had almost come to a standstill, due to the
impossibility of making a new enlargement. With the abandonment and
subsequent decay of some of the tombs, namely those whose concessionary
families had been extinguished, new tombs were erected at the cost of the
demolition of other older ones. Throughout almost the whole of the 20th
century there was an impoverishment of the Lapa cemetery. Even so, almost
all of its largest tombs remained. The alterations that several of them
suffered were due to the concession to other families, leading to the
disappearance of the old inscriptions and, in some cases, of portraits, as
well as funerary artefacts. In other cases, the tombs their original iron
railings.
