COLON CEMETERY. 
81 
Back of the San Lazaro leper hospital is the old Espada Cemetery estab¬ 
lished by Bishop Juan de Espada in 1804, prior to which date the Havana 
custom had been to bury the dead in the vaults of the churches. The 
cemetery was designed after the plan of the ancient Roman columbaria, so 
called from its resemblance to a dove-cote. It consists of tiers of masonry 
niches for the reception of the bodies. There are about 12,000 of these 
compartments, but this figure by no means represents the number of inter¬ 
ments here, since it was the custom to rent the tombs for a term of years, 
and at the expiration of the time the bones were removed and thrown into 
the Osario or bone-pit, which is at the southern end of the walled 
enclosure. Hundreds of thousands of bodies were interred here—for 
longer or shorter terms—between the establishment of the cemetery and 
the time of its disuse in the late ’70s. Our illustration shows some of the 
niches sealed, others empty. It is recorded that these empty wall niches 
in the Espada Cemetery furnished a night’s lodging to many a homeless 
vagrant in the days of reconcentration under Weyler. The tomb of 
Castanon, which the University students were accused of desecrating, was 
one of these niches in the dove-cote tiers in the Espada Cemetery. 
When the Colon Cemetery was completed in 1878 many of the dead 
were removed from Espada to the new cemetery. Of those who rested in 
tomhs held in perpetuity the tombs were transferred to Colon; and those, 
too, who lay in rented graves were given their full term in the new ground. 
THE ESPADA CEMETERY—BEFORE DEMOLITION, 
