Where are the bones of Christopher Columbus?

     Welcome everyone! Today I'm going to be doing a bit of a different type of post. What follows is basically a school paper/report I did recently that I thought was interesting and thought I would share. (Basically - I didn't want to write the blog post I had "scheduled" so I'm doing this instead.)

     Everyone knows about Christopher Columbus, the man who discovered the New World. His life is full of events, and it seems that almost all of them foster some sort of controversy. When studying Columbus and the controversies that surround him, one is almost happy to get to his death. Surely there could be no more controversies now. Wrong.

     Columbus died on May 20, 1506 in the Spanish city of Valladolid. He was buried there. His son, named Diego, didn’t think his father wanted to be buried in Spain but instead in the New World he had discovered. But since there were no buildings grand enough to hold Columbus’ remains, Diego had them disinterred and sent to a monastery in Seville, Spain.

     Diego died in 1526. About ten to fifteen years later, Columbus and Diego’s remains were put on a ship and sent to Santo Domingo (which is the current day Dominican Republic). They were to be buried in the newly constructed Cathedral of Santa Maria la Menor. There the remains lay until Spain ceded Hispaniola – the island that current day Haiti and the Dominican Republic share – to France as part of a peace treaty in 1795. The Spaniards took Columbus’ bones and brought them to Havana, Cuba.

     When the Spanish-American war broke out and Cuba gained its independence from Spain, the Spanish moved Columbus’ remains once again – this time bringing them back to Seville, where he was buried in an ornate tomb at the Seville Cathedral.

     But that was not the end of Columbus’ journeys. In 1877, a worker at the Cathedral of Santa Maria la Menor – where Columbus had been buried – found a lead box with the inscription “The illustrious and excellent man, Don Colon, Admiral of the Ocean Sea.” This box was soon claimed to contain the real remains of Columbus.

     There are several problems with this, however. First, Diego – Columbus’ son – was also known as Don Colon, and his bones were also transported to Santo Domingo with Columbus’. So perhaps these bones are just Diego’s bones that were left in Santo Domingo. Second, it is possible that the box simply contained someone else’s remains that were placed in the wrong box.

     In 2006, the Seville Cathedral had a DNA test conducted on their bones, and DNA experts concluded that the bones were, in fact, those of Columbus. So does that mean that the Dominican Republic does not have Columbus’ bones? Not necessarily.

     The Dominican Republic refuses to let DNA testing be done on their remains, citing respect for the dead as their reason for not disinterring the bones. It would be hard to say without DNA testing whether or not Columbus’ bones do lie in the Dominican Republic. However, it is possible that part of his body is in Seville, and another part is in the Dominican Republic. Until more DNA testing is done, we really won’t know for sure. 

     There's a rather random history-related post! I thought it was pretty interesting to write and learn about. Columbus was is a pretty interesting guy. And I made it through a whole history-related post without throwing in a video off of YouTube. Applaud me! ;) 

     That's it for today. As always, thanks for reading, and have a great week! :)

~Anna