I’m not exactly a huge Orson Welles fan. For example, when I tried watching “Citizen Kane” on DVD and it started skipping, I was too bored by the 15 minutes I had already seen to bother cleaning the disc and instead watched a Disney movie. That’s why the picture accompanying this article – or rather, the fact that I myself took it – surprises me: I care enough about Welles to take a picture of a sign with his name on it?

At this point, you might be confused. Isn’t this an abroad column? Yes, it is; the sign in question is in Spain, specifically the city of Ronda. The sign marks a street named for Welles because his ashes were buried there following his death in 1985. Welles chose Ronda as his final resting place because he was a good friend of one of the famous bullfighters who lived there. He had also filmed parts of various films there, including an unfinished adaptation of “Don Quixote.”

Now that we’ve explained how the sign got there, let’s continue to analyze the fact that I took a picture of it. There are plenty of things to photograph in Ronda, from the bullfighting arena to the horse stable to unique trees…I could go on, but you get the idea. The point is, I didn’t need to take a picture of the sign for the sake of having enough pictures of Ronda.

You may ask, “What were your thoughts right when you decided to take the picture?” They went along the lines of, “Ooh! Orson Welles sign! I’ll take a picture because it’s really random!” And now that I think about it, it was random. After all, George Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and Rainer Maria Rilke were also big fans of the city of Ronda, so they could have had signs with their names on them, too. But they don’t, which I guess has to do with Welles being buried there while the others are not. This begs an interesting question: What does it mean that Welles is buried there? Or, more generically, what does it mean to choose a specific place for burial?

That question reminds me of a scene from the movie “The Birdcage” in which the Robin Williams character declares that the cemetery where he’s purchased a plot is much nicer than the one where the Nathan Lane character has purchased a plot. He goes on to say, “I’ve got to sell my plot…so I can get one next to you…so I never miss a laugh.” To me, that explains what burial means: permanence. When you choose where you’ll be buried, you’re choosing your final, permanent home.

When Welles chose the city of Ronda as his burial place, he chose to make his last home in a country where he wasn’t born, where he didn’t speak the language natively and where he wasn’t living at the time of his death. But he nevertheless chose to call it home. And if he can call Spain home, so can I – though perhaps not as a final permanent home.