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Cemetery of the English

Camariñas, Terra de Soneira, A Coruña

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Cemetery of the English

Curiosity · Camariñas, Terra de Soneira, A Coruña

Cemetery of the English

The Cemiterio dos Ingleses, in the eastern bay of the punta do Boi, in Camariñas, was opened on the initiative of the parish priest of Xaviña to bury the sailors who died on 10 November 1890, when the British warship HMS Serpent, on its way to Sierra Leone, ran aground against the cliffs after mistaking, in bad weather, the faint light of the Cabo Vilán lighthouse. Of the 175 crew members only three survived, washed up on do Trece beach; over the following days more than a hundred bodies reached the shore, which the people of Camariñas, mobilised by the priest of Xaviña, recovered and buried in a cemetery divided into a section for Catholics and another for Protestants. The Royal Navy and Queen Victoria thanked the gesture with gifts to the village. The cemetery is today part of the European Route of Singular Cemeteries.

Photo: Mussklprozz (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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