Capela Dos Ossos

By now, you are likely becoming a little blasé about buildings constructed entirely out of bits of dead people.

You might even be considering finding one of your own — making sure that you have an unsellable house built from the screams of children is certainly one way of avoiding estate agent fees!

The Capela Dos Ossos, aware that it is operating in an increasingly competitive market for unnerving bone-buildings, has upped its game in anticipation of this reaction.

Not only does it explicitly say when you enter the building, “We bones, lying here, await yours”, it also has this to offer:

An adult skeleton hangs from the wall, positioned next to the dried body of a child. Skulls peer from the walls behind them, and limbs build up the arched supports.

To drive home the point they’re making, the text on the ceiling translates as “The day of death is better than the day of birth.”

Debatable, especially if you know that after you are dead your corpse will be hung from a wall and left to be gawped at by tourists for all eternity.

Nightmare Or Comfort?

If you’ve just found that you live close to one of these places, well, before you just up and sell your house online, think about what these ossuaries truly represent.

Although my initial reaction to being inside these buildings was to flinch away from the seemingly gruesome relics (alright, I screamed like a little girl, OK?), but there is a positive side to them.

By demystifying death, they take the sting out of it a little bit. These buildings construct something positive, a place of community or cultural interest, from these bones.

That something unthreatening and positive could be built out of something as negative as death itself speaks for the ingenuity and potential of all mankind.

I find something heartening and almost beautiful in these places myself.

What do you think?