00:00Did you know there's a city where for every living person there are a thousand dead ones?
00:05Sounds like the start of a horror movie, but it's a real place, and it's in California.
00:09The town of Colma, known as the City of the Dead.
00:12It's half the size of Central Park in New York City, but the population is just 1,500,
00:16while 1.5 million are underground residents.
00:19And the town's official motto says, it's great to be alive in Colma.
00:23It all started in 1849, when the gold rush hit San Francisco.
00:27Hundreds of thousands of migrants flooded the city, searching for wealth and a better life,
00:32which led to a rise in disease and death.
00:34Cemeteries started to overflow, and because of fast expansion, ended up right in the city center.
00:39So the authorities made a decision to ban new burials and move the old cemeteries outside the city boundaries.
00:45That's when Colma was founded, as a necropolis.
00:48It soon became an official town, and since then, almost all of its land has been occupied by cemeteries.
00:54There are about 16 of them, and only a small part of the land is reserved for regular town life.
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