Revealing Secrets: Scientists discover why at least 100 corpses have been naturally mummified in a Colombian village since the 1960s

A resident of a Colombian town was perplexed to discover that her mother’s body had been naturally mummified after she died 30 years ago.

The fact was discovered in more than 100 bodies that were exhumed from the San Bernardo municipal cemetery since the 1960s.

In many cases, the bodies still had their hair and nails intact and in some cases they still had skin tissue and eyeballs, which are usually the first to decompose after burial.

Locals have long believed that the bodies were mummified because of their active farming lifestyle or because they were too good during their lives and were being rewarded or punished.

But new research may have found a scientific explanation for why the remains have persisted: it could be a combination of the humidity and the steep mountainside on which the cemetery is located.

The bodies were first discovered when they were exhumed from the municipal cemetery of San Bernardo in 1963, and by the late 1980s, around 50 mummies were being found each year.

Similar natural mummification has been observed in Guanajuato, Mexico, where underground gas and the chemical composition of the soil are responsible for the dead not rotting away.

However, the Guanajuato dead date from the first half of the 19th century, while the San Bernardo mummies are comparatively young.

Mummification involves a process of preserving the body after death by deliberately drying or embalming the flesh, but the San Bernardo bodies were essentially mummified by accident.

After a body is buried, it only takes three to five days for the teeth and nails to fall out, but it can take a decade to decompose, leaving behind a skeleton and traces of hair, skin tissue and clothing fibres.

But when Clovisnerys Bejarano unearthed her mother in 2001, who had been buried three decades earlier, she found her preserved and still in her grave clothes, and said she could have simply been asleep.

“She still has her round, brown face, her braids, her hair,” Bejarano told AFP, adding: “If God wanted to preserve her… it must be for a reason.”

Bejarano’s mother is on display in the mummy museum at the José Arquímedes Castro mausoleum alongside 13 other bodies that were exhumed from the San Bernardo cemetery.

The cemetery removes bodies from its mausoleum every year to make room for the recently deceased.

But the living deceased must give permission for their loved ones to be displayed in glass cases; many have opted to cremate mummified bodies.

Researchers investigating mummification have found no pattern to how or why the bodies were mummified, a process that involves embalming or drying the body of a deceased person.

They reported that all the bodies came from different areas of the cemetery and belonged to different age groups and genders.

“When all this started, people were a bit incredulous about what was happening; “They thought it was an isolated incident,” Rocío Vergara, a guide at the museum, told AFP.

“As time went by, it became more and more common to find bodies in these conditions,” she explained.

At first, scientists thought the mummification could be due to the people’s healthy diet and active, agricultural culture, but a person who was brought to the area from Bogotá, a city about 60 kilometers from San Bernardo, disproved this possibility.

Now researchers are considering one of the only possibilities left to them: the heat from the burial vaults combined with the raised cemetery could mimic an oven.

However, anthropologist Daniela Betancourt of the National University of Colombia said it could be due to the steep slope of the mountain.

“The wind blows constantly because it is hot.

“It is possible to assume that the vaults work like an oven… they dehydrate you,” anthropologist Daniela Betancourt of the National University of Colombia told AFP.

“There has been a lack of studies on what is happening and what specific conditions are those that cause people to become mummified,” she said, adding that the theory will still need to be tested.

Regardless of the reason, some residents are glad that the bodies of their loved ones have been preserved.

“Most people who lose their parents bury them or cremate them and can never see them again,” resident Pabon told the New York Post in 2022, saying she visited her father’s remains every two weeks in 2015 after his body was found.

“But if I miss him, I can see him anytime, and he is exactly as he was in life,” she added.