Old Mallona Cemetery

Walk through this stone arch crowned with a cross and you are entering what was, for three quarters of a century, Bilbao’s city of the dead. Mallona Cemetery was designed in 1828 by the architect Juan Bautista Belaunzarán, when burials inside churches stopped for public health reasons. Until then, the floors of San Antón or Santiago had served as the graveyard.

1The dead of the sieges

Many victims of the Carlist sieges were buried here, and there was once a mausoleum to the town’s defenders, by the sculptor José Bellver, which has not survived. By the late 19th century the cemetery had become too small, too close to the houses and unhealthy. In 1887 the search for a replacement began, and the new Vista Alegre cemetery, in Derio, took over in the early 20th century.

2A half-forgotten place

For years Mallona was a semi-abandoned enclosure of broken tombs and overgrown vegetation, and writers of the time described it as a melancholy corner. That image of a romantic ruin explains some of the aura it still has. Today it is a neighbourhood park, and almost nothing recalls its former use apart from this gateway.

The Calzadas de Mallona, with more than three hundred steps, were the traditional path from Bilbao up to Begoña, and they still are.

3What to look for

• The gateway with its cross, the last remnant of the cemetery.
• The lookout, with the Old Town and the Arriaga at your feet.
• The cypresses, a graveyard tree that gives away the site’s past.