ABSTRACT
Portugal’s first national cemetery laws were issued in the 1830s. Periods of high mortality, often associated with armed conflicts, had motivated the creation of a few local burial laws in the past, but never on a nationwide scale. Portugal was not an isolated case: for centuries, church burial had been the norm in European Catholic countries. The practice began to garner criticism, in Portugal and elsewhere, in the 18th century, as the Age of Enlightenment created a new understanding of death and mortality. Early attempts at regulating burial and cemeteries, issued occasionally through the first three decades of the 19th century, produced little results, and the traditional practice of church burial remained the norm. By the mid-1870s, almost all the municipalities in Portugal had, finally, at least one public cemetery—even if the new sites did not always respect requirements regarding the distance from residential areas, and were built just meters from the local church.
