Second-hand steles are thus sold from 1,800 euros instead of 15,000 on average, which represents a cost up to ten times lower.
However, the formula does not convince all those administered, like Patricia, who came to maintain her husband's grave, who declared that it bothers her.
Municipal services take over these concessions by digging and recovering everything found inside, before removing ornaments such as engraved plaques.
The municipal council of this town in the Hautes-Pyrénées voted at the end of September to implement this social pricing.
The Tarbes town hall offers reused graves and funerary monuments at reduced prices to poor people under means-tested conditions.
In the northern cemetery in Tarbes, which extends over five hectares, the gray marble steles are stored on the side, on pallets.
The municipality justifies this system by the financial difficulties encountered by certain families to pay for a concession, a tank and a funerary monument, in order to allow them to have a dignified burial or to avoid cremation.
These monuments come from old abandoned concessions of which no one was left in the families.
The measure echoes the local situation, where one in three inhabitants lives below the poverty line, double the national average.