DNA study confirms Christopher Columbus’s remains are entombed in Seville
Scientists have ‘definitively’ proved identity of remains – with navigator’s precise origins to be revealed
Scientists in Spain
claim to have solved the two lingering mysteries that cling to
Christopher Columbus more than five centuries after the explorer died:
are the much-travelled remains buried in a magnificent tomb in Seville
Cathedral really his? And was the navigator who changed the course of
world history really from Genoa – as history has long claimed – or was
he actually Basque, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Jewish or Portuguese?
The answer to the first question is yes. The answer to the second is … wait until Saturday.
The
long-running and often competitive theorising has not been helped by
his corpse’s posthumous voyages. Although Columbus died in the Spanish
city of Valladolid in 1506, he wanted to be buried on the island of
Hispaniola, which is today divided into Haiti and the Dominican
Republic. His remains were taken there in 1542, moved to Cuba in 1795,
and then brought to Seville in 1898 when Spain lost control of Cuba
after the Spanish-American war.
On Thursday, after two decades of DNA testing and research,
the forensic medical expert José Antonio Lorente said the incomplete
set of remains in Seville Cathedral were indeed those of Columbus.
“Today, thanks to new technology, the previous
partial theory that the remains in Seville are those of Christopher
Columbus has been definitively confirmed,” said the expert, who led the
study at the University of Granada. The conclusion followed comparisons of DNA samples from the tomb with others taken from one of Columbus’s brothers, Diego, and his son Fernando.
The
knottier question of the explorer’s precise origins will be revealed in
Columbus DNA: His True Origin, a special TV programme shown on Saturday
12 October, the date when Spain celebrates its national day and commemorates Columbus’s arrival in the New World.
While
myriad claims have been made about where the navigator was from – the
theories include Italy, Sweden, Norway, Portugal, France, Greece,
Scotland and a handful of different Spanish regions – the
programme-makers insist they now have the answer.
“Twenty-five
possible origins and eight finalists but there can be only one,”
Spain’s state broadcaster, RTVE, said in a statement.
Lorente, who described the investigation as “very
complicated”, remained tight-lipped about its conclusions. “There are
some really important results – results that will help us in multiple
studies and analyses that should be evaluated by historians,” he told
reporters on Thursday.
He has, however, been
previously quite blunt that he believed Columbus was Genoese, saying in
2021: “There is no doubt on our part [about his Italian origin], but we
can provide objective data that can … close a series of existing
theories.”
The scientist has also pointed out
that parts of Columbus could still be in the Caribbean. In 1877, an
excavation of Santo Domingo Cathedral in the Dominican Republic
unearthed a small lead box of bone fragments marked: “Illustrious and
distinguished male, Christopher Columbus.” Those remains are now buried
at the Faro a Colón monument (Columbus Lighthouse) in Santo Domingo
Este.
Lorente said that as both sets of bones were incomplete, both could belong to the explorer.
If,
as the programme and the attendant hype suggest, the fascination with
Columbus remains undimmed, so, increasingly, does the controversy over
his legacy.
In 2015, Ada Colau, then the mayor
of Barcelona, joined many on the Spanish left in decrying the 12
October celebrations. “Shame that a nation celebrates a genocide and, on
top of that, with a military parade that costs 800,000 euros,” she tweeted.
José
María González Santos, the then mayor of Cádiz, agreed. “We never
discovered America, we massacred and suppressed a continent and its
cultures in the name of God,” he said. “Nothing to celebrate.”
Four years ago, a statue of Columbus in Richmond, Virginia, was torn down, set ablaze and thrown into a lake. A sign reading “Columbus represents genocide” was then placed on the spray-painted foundation that once held the figure.
