Tomb of Christopher Columbus

There is absolutely no one in the world who has crossed the Atlantic Ocean more times dead than alive like Christopher Columbus. Near the south door of the Seville Cathedral rests this colossal bronze tomb, arguably the most dramatic monument in world maritime history. Although it sits quietly in Spain now, before arriving here, these highly controversial bones were “smuggled” back and forth between the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Spain for over four hundred years, playing out an endless transoceanic odyssey of the dead.

Walk up to this massive monument, and you’ll be immediately stunned by the imposing formation before you: four life-sized, lavishly robed bronze kings are taking heavy strides, hoisting Columbus’s casket high in mid-air. If you turn on your “microscope vision,” don’t just stare at the coffin; move your eyes to the lance held by the king in the front right. The tip of the lance is actually piercing a pomegranate! To modern eyes, stabbing fruit with a weapon might look like performance art, but in 15th-century Spain, a “pomegranate” (Granada) represented the city of Granada—the last Muslim stronghold on the Iberian Peninsula. That spear thrust signified that the Catholic Monarchs had entirely completed the “Reconquista,” clearing the final domestic political hurdle for Columbus’s grand voyage.

For someone who knows absolutely nothing about medieval Spanish history, you might ask: who are these four big shots willing to act as Columbus’s pallbearers? They aren’t ordinary security guards; they represent the four ancient kingdoms that made up modern Spain: Castile, León, Aragon, and Navarre. Look at the two kings in front: they stand tall with their chests puffed out, sporting coats of arms with lions and castles, because it was them (Isabella, Queen of Castile and León) who paid out of pocket to sponsor Columbus’s insane blind-box game. Meanwhile, the two kings in the back have their heads bowed with reluctant expressions, because back then, their kingdoms couldn’t have cared less about Columbus’s sailing plan. Sculptor Arturo Mélida used these incredibly vivid “workplace micro-expressions” to perfectly capture a complex history of national mergers.

Place this coffin in the grand coordinates of history, and you’ll discover a massive geopolitical joke. When Columbus died in 1506, broke, miserable, and full of resentment towards the Spanish royal family who mistreated him, he swore a venomous oath: “Even in death, my bones will never be buried in Spanish soil!” So, initially, he was buried in Spain anyway, but later his daughter-in-law shipped his bones to the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean. Centuries later, the French conquered the Dominican Republic, so the Spaniards hurriedly dug up the “suspected” bones of Columbus and moved them to Cuba. By 1898, the Spanish-American War broke out, Spain was thoroughly beaten by the US and lost Cuba, so these weather-beaten bones had to be packed up overnight and smuggled back to Seville in disgrace. This coffin isn’t just one man’s wandering; every time it moved, it accompanied the loss of Spanish imperial territory, making it a literal, physical death knell of the empire going from its zenith to total collapse.

Interestingly, when the coffin finally returned to Seville in 1898, the local government, trying not to violate Columbus’s venomous dying wish of “never touching Spanish soil,” came up with a brilliant physical loophole: have four bronze men hold him up in mid-air! Not touching the ground technically counted as keeping the promise. It wasn’t until 2006 that Spanish scientists extracted and ran DNA tests on the bones inside, finally confirming that it really was Columbus himself in there (though only about 150 grams of bone fragments). When you stand beneath this coffin forcibly suspended in the air, will you marvel at this final stubbornness in the sunset of an empire, or will you inevitably sympathize with this old navigator who was tossed around by politics and history so much that he couldn’t even keep his feet on the ground after death?