The ancient neolithic tomb pictured above was destroyed and replaced by the monolothic concrete park bench pictured below.
Locals are displeased, but it's too late to do much about it and "the local council claims nobody told them it was a historical site."
Local mayor of Cristovo de Cea, Jose Luis Valladores, refused to apologise when told of the complaint saying that the environmental group would have been better to raise the matter before the site was destroyed instead of afterwards. He said that neither the heritage group nor the environmental group had ever referred to its importance.
NPR reports on various similar renovations, usually performed at least in vague awareness of what is being cemented over.
In 2007, as The New York Times reports, "a work crew in the ancient capital city of Nanjing unearthed and destroyed the burial sites of 10 noblemen from six dynasties."
Just last year, according to archaeologists, an ancient Native American burial ground and village in California was discovered and then razed in order to make way for multimillion-dollar homes.
However, the mistaken destruction of ancient relics isn't completely unheard of.
In 2013, NPR's Scott Neuman wrote about workers destroying a 2,300-year-old Mayan pyramid in Belize to use the rubble for road repair. They were apparently unaware that the pyramid was a Mayan ruin.
And then there are times when even the best intentions to preserve ancient relics go horribly awry, like this story from NPR's Eyder Peralta about a painter's attempt to restore a fresco
