Locals from San Miguel have gathered to demand the closure of a funeral parlour in the centre of San Miguel, the plans for which they say were deliberately hidden from residents due to its unsatisfactory location. The parlour in Calle San Narciso occupies the ground floor of a building, with families living above. They believed when they brought their homes that the two roomed premises would be an office or a shop, never a funeral parlour.
Local neighbourhood association Archangel San Miguel is voicing the town’s disgust at the decision to open the facility and said it is prepared to go to court to get it moved.
More than one hundred people gathered outside the doors of the funeral home, which is already open for business. The Association said t is publically calling for “the precautionary suspension of the activity and the closure of the facilities.”
On 1st July, 2020, by Mayoral decree, the municipality of San Miguel de Salinas granted the opening and start of activity license to the funeral parlour. The granting of the licence brought to an end a long procedure started in the summer of 2018 and rejects the allegations presented by the neighbourhood association itself and the affected residents.
There has been no response to their demands for guarantees of protection against potential contagions and epidemics, or other secondary but equally important problems , such as respecting the acceptable hours of commerce, traffic problems and loading and unloading of caskets, which is done out on the street due to the lack of adequate facilities in the building.
There are also queries over the legality of the premises as a funeral home, as by law these should have a cold storage room and a ‘tatanopraxia’ which is where corpses are embalmed and prepared for viewing – neither of which have been included in the San Miguel parlour. Despite this the parlour has already hosted the funeral of a resident of Torremendo, with the presence of numerous relatives and neighbours in the street.
The local government has reiterated that the application began in the previous municipal mandate and that it is an administratively regulated procedure in which there is little scope to act from the political point of view and, under which, the municipality is open to a lawsuit from the company if it had decided not to grant the license.
Previously, funerals for San Miguel residents were held in Torrevieja, more than eight kilometres away – in a morgue run by the same company as the new parlour. However, with the opening of a morgue by a competitor in the town’s industrial estate, the company decided to open the new parlour.