
It looks more like a pit or a landfill site for household rubbish.

This barren plot of land lies a few miles outside the nearest town, surrounded only by more dust, and other than two stone pillars at the entrance, there are no indications that hundreds of men, women and children are buried here.

The anonymous graveyard is the final resting place for refugees who have drowned trying to cross the Mediterranean, and whose bodies have washed up in Zarzis, a coastal town in southeastern Tunisia.

Graveyard: Hundreds of men, women, and children whose bodies have washed up in the shore of Zarzis in Tunisia are buried in unmarked massgraves in this landfill site outside the town

The bodies of the unfortunate have been washing up on the coast of Zarzis for years, but in the wake of the wars in Syria and the Middle East, and economic and social instability on the African continent, they have increased in numbers.

The recent migrant crisis in Europe has had different results here, where those who never made it across the sea eventually end up.

When a body washes up on the shores of Zarzis they are taken to a local volunteer doctor, writes Eric Reidy who has been investigating the fates of those who have perished trying to cross the Mediterranean.

Mr Reidy reveals that although a report is supposed to be filed each time a body is recovered, they only take three pieces of information down: signs of violence, cause of death, and time of death.

Final resting place: Other than the two stone pillars at the entrance of the site, there is no physical indication that this is a graveyard or that hundreds of people are buried here

Tragic: A car arrives at the 'graveyard', where the Zarzis authorities have been burying the bodies of migrants and refugees who have drowned while trying to cross the Mediterranean

No dignity: Sometimes up to 30 bodies wash up at the same time, and locals have been burying more than a dozen people in each grave

The locals do not want the bodies buried in the local Muslim cemetery as there is no way of telling the religion of the victims, and the local morgue only holds six at any one time.

Sometimes up to 30 bodies wash up at the same time, and as a result, hundreds of migrants and refugees have been taken to the burial site, located five miles outside Zarzis.

Their bodies are loaded onto garbage trucks and then unceremoniously dumped into mass graves, sometimes more than a dozen at a time, and covered in dirt.

'The bodies are buried in piles. They just dig and put them in the ground,' Mohammed Trabelsi, a volunteer with the Tunisian Red Crescent body management committee, told Mr Reidy.

Some who made it: Refugees and migrants arrive on a dinghy from the Turkish coast to the Skala Sykaminias village on the northeastern Greek island of Lesbos on Friday

Saved: More than 80 African migrants arrive at the port of Zarzis in March this year, after Tunisian fishermen rescued them off the coast of the town aboard a makeshift boat bound for the Italian island of Lampedusa

As such little information is taken down, and no photographs taken of the bodies, it makes it near impossible for families and relatives to track down their lost loved ones or find out what has happened to their bodies.

The Tunisian Red Crescent, with the support of the International Committee for the Red Cross, is currently campaigning hard to secure individual graves, better post-mortem checks and that making it a requirement to record necessary information for body identification, but this is still a long way away.

They are among more than 600,000 people, mainly fleeing violence in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, who have braved the dangerous sea journey across the Mediterranean to Europe so far this year.