The “spontaneous” mummies that intrigue a Colombian town

Clovisnerys Bejarano kneels to pray in front of the body of her mother, Saturnina, who died almost 30 years ago, but whose facial features are preserved thanks to a mysterious mummification process that happens in a “spontaneous” in the Colombian town of San Bernardo.

“She still has her dark, round face, her little braids, her hair (…) if God wanted to leave her there it will be for a reason”Bejarano tells AFP in front of the glass urn where the body is exhibited in a museum in this municipality just over 100 kilometers south of Bogotá (center).

Saturnina Torres de Bejarano died in 1993 at home due to a heart problem. Her body was deposited in a vault in the town’s only cemetery. When he was exhumed in 2001, her relatives found him still with hair, nails and most of his tissues intact. It wasn’t a surprise.

“For us, as San Bernardinos, (mummification) has become our daily bread”explains Rocío Vergara, the person in charge of the exhibition where 14 corpses are exhibited that escaped decomposition for reasons not yet explained. Some even keep their eyes and nails.

In 1963 the first mummified body appeared in the vaults of this cemetery located on a windswept hillside. The phenomenon has been repeated since then: at the end of the eighties, there were 50 cases per year. Currently, the figure has been reduced to a handful of cases per year, details the person in charge of the museum located in the same facilities.

The relatives of the mummified deceased must authorize its exhibition. Most choose to dismember and cremate the remains. The Bejarano family did not want their mother to have that fate.

Unanswered

“God wanted to leave it to us and there we have it (…) Seeing someone like that, how can you let it be cut?” and cremate, says Clovisnerys Bejarano, 63, who periodically takes her grandchildren to visit the museum.

“They leave happy to visit great-grandmother. They say: ‘Oh, it wasn’t that big. No wonder my grandmother is not tall.’ “It feels very good”says this housewife.

According to Vergara, “although the door has been opened to investigations by different universities (…) the exact cause has never been determined” which leads to the bodies being preserved in the San Bernardo cemetery.

Locals believe that the phenomenon is due to the good nutrition of the inhabitants of this municipality with a temperate climate and agricultural vocation.

However, this theory has no scientific support. Furthermore, there are intact corpses that contradict this hypothesis, such as that of Jorge Armando Cruz, a San Bernandino who spent most of his life in Bogotá, where he died.

There is also no pattern in the mummified bodies: they had different ages at the time of death and no particular sex or build predominates. The person in charge of the museum also does not detect a sector of the cemetery that dumps more mummies than the others.

“Spontaneous”

The only certainty is that the answer must be found in the vaults, given that the phenomenon began to occur when the municipality inaugurated this cemetery, where there are no underground tombs.

Before the 1960s, San Bernardo had had two cemeteries in which there was not a single case of mummification, Vergara points out.

“The climate has also been studied and it has been shown that it is temperate, humid, it should help a lot to decompose the bodies”adds the guide.

After a tour of the tombs and the museum, anthropologist and researcher at the National University of Colombia, Daniela Betancourt, points out that the San Bernardo mummies are similar in appearance to those of Guanajuato, in Mexico, and Palermo, Italy.

He also tries an explanation: “The cemetery is on a steep mountainside. The wind is constantly blowing at the same time as it is hot. It is possible to assume that the vaults work like a cooking oven (…) it dehydrates you little by little.”

However, he warns that his hypothesis would need to be tested with experiments. “It could be a scenario (…) completely spontaneous,” concludes.

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