According to the World Population Reference Office, there are about 101 billion deaths on earth so far and an estimated 7 billion more in the next century. With the number of deaths outnumbering the living, it is not surprising that space at the cemetery has become so narrow and there is a shortage of land for burial.
Many European countries used a cemetery for centuries by expanding the space to be buried. In the old Jewish cemetery in Prague (Czech Republic), when space ran out, a new layer of soil was placed on the existing graves to make room for new people. When the last burial took place in 1787, there were 12 layers of burial mounds stacked up like terraced fields. In Norway, instead of piling corpses in soil layers, ancient graves were dug up after two decades, which is the time the authorities hope enough for the body to decompose. Some cemeteries even put in limestone coffins to speed up the decomposition process.
Norway is not a typical example in this regard, but the UK has used this method until now. And a study shows that if burial remains as common in 2050 as today, the world will need 6,500 km of land (more than 5 times the size of New York City) for burial. . As a result, many countries are heading towards the sky by raising graves up high instead of burying them directly on the ground.
Asia is currently leading the trend of burying the dead in ground cemeteries such as China, Vietnam and many other countries due to the large land bank and can be used to bury the dead comfortably. However, others are not so favored because the land bank is quite small compared to the current population. In Hong Kong, cemeteries are often built on hillsides to save space. In Japan, an entrepreneur even opened a hotel for the dead, where families with lost loved ones could temporarily keep the corpses while looking for a suitable place to bury.
Other countries around the world bury the dead in a different way: building tall buildings for the dead, such as the Memorial Necrópole Ecumênica high-rise cemetery in Santos in Brazil. As of now, it is 32 stories high and has space to accommodate 25,000 more people. When it was built in 1983, it was just a small building, but the need for a tomb to see the whole ground was huge in this country. Therefore, they continue to add floors until it becomes the highest cemetery in the world.
Besides the tombs, the building has rooms, caves, tombs, chapels and snack bars on the roof. The building is surrounded by beautiful gardens, forests, lagoons and waterfalls.
Israel's Tel Aviv is also building a new building in Yarkon Cemetery, which can hold about 250,000 tombs. In order not to offend the Orthodox Jews, the building tower contains pipes filled with soil, so that each layer is still connected to the ground.
In Mumbai, India, people also build cemeteries with high-rise buildings called Moksha tower, when completed it will be the tallest cemetery in the world, surpassing Memorial Necrópole Ecumênica in Brazil. However, even if there is more space for the dead by building more high-rise buildings, the building's designers only allow the body to only stay there for 5-10 years, because really The population density in Mumbai is overcrowded both for the living and for the dead.
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