Image Courtesy of Condé Nast Traveller
By Sophie Rasmussen
It is easy to get lost in the avenues and alleyways of Buenos Aires’s Recoleta Cemetery, not only because of the height of the mausoleums, but also because of their stunning beauty. There is a great variety of styles, the most common being Art Nouveau, neo-Gothic, and Baroque. There are tombs made of stone, granite, or marble; intricate engravings and tendrils; obelisks, Egyptian pyramids, and mausoleums shaped like miniature cathedrals. Statues are ubiquitous, many of angels and cupids but others of the residents themselves. A look through glass windows or iron grills shows tombs, photographs, and miscellaneous artefacts. There is even beauty in the vaults in disrepair. While its attractiveness is one of its main draws, visitors interact with the cemetery in a plethora of ways.
The cemetery was originally built in 1822 out of necessity after churches and churchyards started filling up. It was constructed in the outskirts of Buenos Aires as the city’s first public cemetery, but after the upper classes responded to an 1870s yellow fever epidemic by moving to Recoleta, the cemetery’s inhabitants became more representative of the surrounding area. More than a century later, its noteworthy residents are one of the cemetery’s best known characteristics. Aside from unremarkable members of upper-class families, those buried include ‘heroines, scoundrels, patriots, popular saints, despots, eminent citizens, playboys, famous beauties, tycoons, and ne’er-do-wells of whom history and gossip are made.’ The most popular tomb is that of Eva ‘Evita’ Perón, but also present are presidents such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento; General Tomás Guido, hero of the War of Independence; Guillermo Brown, the (Irish!) founder of the Argentine Navy; and President Raúl Alfonsín, who led Argentina’s return to democracy after its last dictatorship.
The idea that the greats of Argentine history should be buried here is so prevalent that there is a movement to bring writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges’s remains back from Geneva, where he wanted to be buried, to Recoleta Cemetery; one tour guide says that he is the cemetery’s ‘greatest absence.’ Anthropologist C. G. M. Robben believes that the rich, famous, and successful both entertain us and inspire us to become great ourselves. He calls the cemetery ‘the pantheon of the nation,’ and I have to agree. The cemetery’s identity as a status symbol both catches people’s attention and leads to desperation to become part of it. Families argue over who will be buried in their vault, and they design them to preserve their stories for posterity. Such is the cemetery’s prestige that some families hold funeral ceremonies in it, only to bury the departed elsewhere because they cannot afford a mausoleum.
Image Courtesy of Forever Roaming the Roads
Still, many of those to whom this problem does not apply go to the cemetery for fun. Looking back at photos from my most recent trip, I realized that I am part of this group; most pictures were of the prettiest mausoleums and the stray cats basking in the sun. But the beautiful architecture is by no means the only source of amusement here. There are countless myths and true stories surrounding the cemetery’s two centuries of burials. A common one is that of David Alleno, one of its first grave diggers, who, having saved just enough money to buy a tomb in such a distinguished location, promptly killed himself. Tour guides have fun telling these stories and becoming part of them; sometimes one will start shaking uncontrollably on the ground in front of a group of children and another will tell them that it is a corpse who wants to leave the cemetery. They also sometimes lock tourists in mausoleums if they wander inside. The entertainment value means that the place is often not treated like a cemetery. I have seen people shouting and running around, and in 2017 a tourist went to hospital because he was climbing a wall to take a photo of a famous mausoleum and slipped, falling onto a statue. Possibly for this reason maintenance men lament that there are many more tourists than visitors who genuinely want to pay their respects.
For some, the cemetery is an arena for political expression, partly because of the fame of those buried here. Vandalism is not uncommon; in 2018 anarchists bombed the tomb of ex-Police Chief Ramón Falcón, who had been executed by anarchists in 1909. Just a few years ago, the grave of Raúl Alfonsín, the aforementioned former president, was found with spray paint in the form of symbols of his political enemies. For the same reason, the cemetery has been no stranger to grave robbing. Notably, in 1974 the Montoneros became the first guerrilla group to steal a body when they confiscated the corpse of President Pedro Aramburu — whom, incidentally, they had killed a few years earlier — and refused to return him until Evita’s body was brought back to Argentina after twenty years in Europe. Occasionally the government itself has used the cemetery for political purposes. In 1989, less than a decade after the end of Argentina’s final dictatorship and the Dirty War, President Carlos Menem was keen that the country proceed united and not let the past divide them. To this end he brought the body of Juan Manuel de Rosas, a tyrant from the nineteenth century, back from his grave in England and buried him in Recoleta Cemetery. Menem wanted to use the funeral procession as a symbol of national reconciliation. A week after the reburial, he pardoned 277 military officers and former guerrillas who had been involved in the Dirty War, having used Recoleta Cemetery to exemplify his plan for peace.
Image Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
This all shows that Recoleta Cemetery is not really a cemetery at all; cemeteries house the dead, but there is nothing dead about many of the residents here. Several people are buried next to their enemies. This includes both rival families and individual people. De Rosas lies close to President Sarmiento, José Mármol, and others he exiled. Also nearby is Facundo Quiroga, who invaded Sarmiento’s town and caused him to flee the country. Though possibly less obviously, these relationships are still alive. Present at de Rosas’s reburial, for instance, were descendants of his political enemies; this is the closest one could get to having the men there themselves. Reburials in general, of which there have been many, introduce the dead back to life. These prominent men also live on when conflicts and attacks at the cemetery take place in their names. As discussed above, the tombs of individual families hold past ancestors but also present conflicts as they determine who will be included when the time comes.
Recoleta Cemetery is often described as a microcosm of a city. Some memorable terms are ‘ultra-chic necro-neighborhood’ and ‘the most select of gated communities’ On his trip, poet Alfred Corn visited one or two graves and then ‘absorbed the place for what it was, a miniature city in granite, marble, and limestone.’ Is this because it is organized by streets? Because some mausoleums are vaguely shaped like houses, complete with door knockers? Because there are some miniature ‘cathedrals’? I agree with the analogy, but for a different reason. The identities of the people interned here ensure that whatever their bodies tell us, they will never truly die. Illustrative of this is one of the cemetery’s saddest legends. As the story goes, in 1902, after suffering a cataleptic episode, teenager Rufina Cambaceres was accidentally buried alive. A few days later, seeing that the coffin was partially broken, a cemetery worker opened it to find scratch marks on the inside, evidence of the girl’s attempts to escape. Rufina might have been the only one whose heart was still pumping when she was buried, but she was by no means the only one buried alive. As Borges says of the Recoleta Cemetery in one of his poems, ‘only life exists.’
Sophie Rasmussen is a Second Year King’s College London History student from the United States. Half Argentine, she is highly interested in the country’s culture, politics, and history.
