Fifteen babies were among 206 people whose bodies went unclaimed by relatives or friends in Lisbon over the past year, according to a charitable brotherhood that arranges funerals for those left without anyone to bury them.
The Irmandade de São Roque says it has never recorded so many infant cases. Its overall total is the highest in 22 years apart from 2021, during the Covid-19 pandemic, when it buried 233 people.
Speaking to Expresso, the brotherhood’s head, Mário Pinto Coelho, linked many of the babies’ cases to severe poverty.
Most, he said, involved children born with malformations who subsequently died. Some mothers provided false addresses when leaving maternity hospitals because they could not, or did not want to, pay for a funeral.
“They are often very poor people whose pregnancies were not monitored,” he said.
The dead were remembered at Lisbon’s São Roque church on October 17, the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. Paper banners carried their names; some bore only the word “foetus”, marking lives that ended before a name was given.
The brotherhood’s annual figures have risen steadily: from 152 in 2023 to 175 in 2024, 187 last year and now 206.
Most cases involve homeless people who die on the streets or in hospital, Pinto Coelho said. Others are elderly people who die alone in homes or boarding houses.
Sometimes relatives are traced but decline to become involved, including through fear of having to pay funeral costs.
Pinto Coelho pointed to unresolved problems in education, employment and housing as possible factors behind the cases.
Founded in 1506, the brotherhood has accompanied 3,189 funerals over the past 22 years. Around 30 members and volunteers ensure someone attends each ceremony.
Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa covers the costs, approximately €400 per funeral. There is a wooden coffin, a priest and flowers.
The burial, at Lisbon’s Alto de São João cemetery, is in an unmarked grave.
Natasha Donn
Journalist for the Portugal Resident.