The Spanish Town That Made Death Against the Law

In 1999, the mayor of a small Spanish town signed an official decree making it illegal to die. It wasn't really a joke, and it wasn't really enforceable either. It was a warning dressed up as a law.

The town is Lanjarón, a spa town tucked into the mountains of southern Spain, in the Alpujarra region below the Sierra Nevada. Most people outside Spain have never heard of it, though its mineral water is well known within the country.

The decree came from a genuine problem. Lanjarón's cemetery had run out of space, and the regional government hadn't approved land to expand it. With nowhere new to bury anyone, the mayor banned dying until the paperwork caught up.

Reality did not cooperate. According to several retellings, a 91-year-old resident, a friend of the mayor's, died about a week later. He was buried without incident, decree or no decree.

When people questioned exactly what authority let a mayor outlaw death, he reportedly brushed it off, saying only God ultimately decides such things. It was less a legal claim than a shrug: the decree was really aimed at the regional bureaucracy holding up the cemetery expansion, not at mortality itself.

The strange part is how long the underlying problem lasted. As recently as 2025, more than a quarter century after that decree, Lanjarón expanded its cemetery again to keep up with demand, adding new burial space to handle the town's needs.

So the "ban" never stopped anyone from dying. What it did was turn a mundane zoning delay into a story that outlived the delay itself, a small-town mayor using absurdity to make a bureaucratic headache impossible to ignore. Sometimes the fastest way to get someone's attention isn't a formal complaint. It's a decree so strange that everyone has to ask what's really going on.