Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Overland Cemeteries of New Orleans!!!

While several places in the world suffer from shortage of ground water resources New Orleans, Louisiana has the opposite problem... too much water. Two feet into the ground would yield water. This has led to great challenges to the local population in pretty much every field of endeavor. Building homes, roads, bridges, commercial structures are expensive and takes lot more efforts than elsewhere in the US.

Perhaps this problem made the people to build cemeteries over the ground instead of digging graves. Over the past few centuries the mainly Christian immigrants from Europe and Africa to this place have started building graves above the ground. These graves look more like small rooms than places for eternal resting. I visited the St Louis Cemetery which was established in 1854. This is one of the Catholic cemeteries in the area. There are several mega burial buildings which have several members of the same family resting. Then there are small individual rooms where one person is spending the afterlife awaiting the judgement day. Here are few pictures of the cemetery.





1 comment:

Gopinath Mavinkurve said...

Amazing! I never knew this! Thanks for posting it with the pics