La Isleta Necropolis

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria · Category: Memory · Subcategory: Memory spaces

The former La Isleta Necropolis used to be located down at La Puntilla, right next to Las Canteras beach, on rough volcanic wasteland. It was made up of several hundred individual grave mounds, many of which were dug up last century by René Verneau, Diego Ripoche and D. Gregorio Chil.

Most of these structures were integrated into a cist, a kind of coffin where the body was placed, which was boxed in by large volcanic stones, and these in turn were covered by smaller stones to make up the typical appearance of the grave mounds. According to Verneau, no mummified bodies were found, but they were wrapped in a thick cloth with aromatic plant seeds placed all around them like a single trousseau. In the following description of the settlement made in the 19th century by Briton Olivia Stone (1887), there were new elements which allow us to imagine what a mound must have been like in its original state. 

... In each case the bodies were laid in a narrow strip, just under ground level, surrounded by large lumps of flat lava rock, similar to slabs, over which a mound had been carefully built up with small lava stones. None of the mounds had red stones, making this cemetery at La Isleta different from the one at Agaete (...) the sides have walls around four feet high, made out of large volcanic stones whose flat surfaces have been carefully placed inwards. The upper part of the mounds are made with smaller stones thrown on top of these, leaving them as they landed but making a kind of natural low pyramid shape.

The necropolis at La Isleta has been traditionally linked to the settlements at Confital, probably as they are the only remaining ones. However, their dimensions indicate the possible existence of other inhabitant groups around the area which were either destroyed or simply covered up by the present day city.

28.148935, -15.429643