back to article Apple builds flagship store on top of PLAGUE HOSPITAL

Apple has plonked its flagship Madrid store atop the ruins of a 15th century hospital built to care for plague victims. According to a report in Spanish-language newspaper El Pais, which we ran through Google Translate, the Apple store not only has a load of iGoods "in its basement", but the remnants of the city's old Buen …

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  1. Richard 81

    Well yes

    This is Europe, where the history comes from. You can't dig a hole in this continent without discovering something.

    It's a bloody nightmare for gardeners.

    1. Kubla Cant
      Pirate

      Re: Well yes

      A nightmare for builders too, I suspect. When I was about 10 years old, it became known that bones were turning up on a local building site. A group of us went down there and picked a few choice items out of a trench, including a human vertebra that I subsequently took to school to show to the history teacher. The street sign said something like "Orchard Close (formerly Pesthouse Lane)", so this too was probably the remains of a plague hospital. You can see why they changed the street name.

      This was back in the fifties when:

      - a trench containing human remains was not cordoned off by the Police

      - no archeologists were involved

      - it didn't seem risky for kids to poke around in a plague burial

      - a primary school teacher wasn't much fazed when a kid turned up with human remains

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Well yes

      The only place you can dig a shallow pit and find an empty space, Texas, as empty as George Bush Jr's head.

      1. LateNightLarry
        Pint

        Re: Well yes

        Wouldn't even have to be a shallow pit... it could be very deep, and still be as empty as George Bush the Younger's head.

  2. TRT Silver badge

    World War Z

    The App store is plagued by zombies... and now the Apple Store.

    I'm off to get a new iPod...

    *grabs cricket bat*

    1. Simon Harris

      Re: World War Z

      "In extreme circumstances, Apple sales assistants can be stopped by removing the head or destroying the brain. I will repeat that: by removing the head or destroying the brain."

      1. Gordon Lawrie
        Joke

        Re: World War Z

        Destroying the brain may be struggle.

      2. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. Mercifull
      Joke

      Re: World War Z

      You've got (RED)™ on you.

  3. Khaptain Silver badge

    High Fives no longer.- Whoop , Whoop

    As you pass by the door just after purchasing the latest iGadget you wil no longer get a Whoop, Whoop with a high five.

    Instead an iNurse will swipe with you a swab and an iDoctor will inject your some with some iRemedy to protect against Whooping Cough.

  4. ElectricFox
    Headmaster

    I always used to wonder why the French used the same word for "electronic chip" as for "fleas".

    [The grammar Nazi is also interested in etymology....]

    1. Nigel 11

      Flea-brained gadget? Pea-brained gadget? Any connection?

    2. Dr_N
      Thumb Down

      I always used to wonder why the French used the same word for "electronic chip" as for "fleas".

      They don't:

      The 'Chip = "Le puce"

      The flea = "La puce"

      1. Steve Knox
        Paris Hilton

        So....

        An electronic chip is a male flea....? (flea-male...?)

        1. Daniel B.

          Etimologies

          hehe. In Spanish, computers are female (La Computadora) though sometimes they have it as a male (El Computador). Spaniards have male sorting machines (El Ordenador), haven't seen them use that word as a female though.

          (BTW, the 'sorting machine' variation was inherited from French, wonder what gender they use for ordinateur?)

          1. Irony Deficient

            l’ordinateur

            Daniel, ordinateur is masculine; French -ateur and Spanish -ador are both descendants of Latin -ator. Had ordinateur been feminine, its form would have been ordinateuse instead.

      2. Irony Deficient

        puce contre puce

        Dr_N, my Oxford Hachette dictionary (from 1997) lists the silicon puce as being feminine also. Is it wrong? Has the Académie française since declared it masculine?

  5. Simon Rockman

    Fleas? So that's entomology.

  6. Magister

    There are a lot of places where things are being built on top of cemetaries, churches, plague hospitals, battlefields. The amount of land available is finite; and if it is long enough ago, probably won't be an issue.*

    I once worked in a place where the cellar had been used as a storage place for slaves. There were still large iron bolts with huge rings in the walls as it would have cost too much to remove them. This was where they were all chained together in captivity.

    It was an odd place; a lot of people didn't like working there. Apparently, several years after I was there, they had to have some work done and the back yard was dug up to get access to sewers. They found the remains of a large number of bodies (some children) that seemed to be from that period.

    * Note that viruses can remain dormant for a long time before being re-activated and infecting people.

    1. Nigel 11
      IT Angle

      Plague ....

      So is it not actually true that the plague bacillus can survive many centuries to infect someone who digs up a plague-pit? (Bubonic / Pneumonic Plague is a bacillus, not a virus, though some of the plagues might not really have been Plague. The symptoms also match a killer flu like the 1919 one, so far as one can tell from such contemporary medical description as has survived).

      I had read that plague graves were best undisturbed for milennia. That should someone accidentally dig one up, they should immediately re-bury it, cease work, keep a VERY close watch on their health for the next couple of weeks, and change the building plans.

      1. JulianB

        Re: Plague ....

        Not sure, but I seem to remember an incident where building work opened a plague pit that was coincidentally next to somewhere that had been an ice house for centuries*, and there were serious concerns about frozen bacilli having survived.

        *That part seems implausible now I come to repeat it...

  7. We're all in it together

    Quick I must patent that

    ibasement (tm)

  8. Gareth Perch

    Polt-i-geist

    "You son of a bitch - you moved the cemetery but you left the bodies didn't ya?!"

  9. D@v3

    misread headline

    please someone tell me i wasn't the only one to read that as 'on top of Prague Hotel'.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Re. Quick I must patent that

    iPlague.

    AC/DC

  11. Peddler

    Will all of the Geniuses...

    be wearing plague doctor masks, like at an eighteenth century Parisian ball?

  12. David Cantrell
    Go

    "It's just foundations" - quite remarkably sensible there, from the local council bod. If only his British counterparts would do likewise

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