The city council opens the municipal cemetery at New Year’s Eve and meets the citizens with lights and classical music. 5.000 people were expected this year.

There are several ways to welcome the New Year, but only a few are so original as the one offered by the Chilean town of Talca, which opens the doors of its cemetery so that citizens can spend New Year’s Eve with their loved ones already dead.

This peculiar ceremony has been celebrated this year again. It has been taking place for eleven years now and was thought to be attended by more than five thousand people.

Before midnight, Mario Molina, Talca’s vicar, celebrated mass. Soon after, around eleven o’clock at night, the town’s mayor, Patricio Herrera, was in charge of opening the cemetery’s doors so that citizens welcome New Year near their loved ones’ graves.

The cemetery waited visitors with lights and classical music in all the yards, “the idea is to provide a warm atmosphere to all those people who want to join us in this special celebration which has become a tradition in Talca”, the administrator of the cemetery points out.

The tradition started in 1995, when Opazo family decided to jump the cemetery walls to welcome the New Year near the father’s grave.