Annals of the dead (7) ....cemeteries in Buenos Aires

The most famous cemetery in Buenos Aires is the one of La Recoleta. This cemetery in the rich neighborhood of Recoleta was found in 1722 using the gardens of a disbanded convent.

The cemetery contains 4691 vaults. 94 were declared national monuments. Burried here are Evita Peron, several argentine presidents or dictators like Mitre, Sarmiento and Roca, Nobel prize winners like Leloir (chemistry), generals, artists and actors.

Like the neighborhood around it, it is a popular tourist destination, in particular the otherwise unspectecular grave of Eva Peron in a side alley which is too narrow for the number of her admirers.

The graves of these celebrities are well maintained while some of the other vaults have fallen into disrepair. Probably people cannot afford the price of many ten thousands of dollars for a tomb here. The cemetery might be one of the most beautiful in the world with respect of the beauty of its buildings, but it is definitely not representative of Buenos Aires or Argentina. It is a place for the rich and famous, the others are buried elsewhere.

The other big cemetery is La Chacarita. Like Recoleta it has got the big artistic vaults, memorials and celebrities, in particular many artists like the tango singer Gardel.

 

It was found in consequence of a yellow fever epidemic when the other cemeteries did not have more capacity. In fact the posh Recoleta cemetery refused to take victims of the epidemic. Special sections are reserved for the british and german community. The german section contains the graves of Hans Langsdorff (1894–1939), Captain of the World War II battleship Admiral Graf Spree who sank his ship in the port of Buenos Aires to avoid being captured by the British, and Friedrich Bergius, who received the nobel price in chemistry in 1931.

However, the biggest part are the endless rows of burial chambers. The older ones are above ground. A lot of them are broken and in some you can detect bones and skulls behind the fragments of the front plate.

 

The newer ones are in endless rows of subterranean tunnels. Some have plastic or real flowers, but save their photographs most of the occupants seem to be forgotten.

 

Beyond there is a big yard of even poorer gravesites. Wooden crosses, some flowers, overgrown with weeds. Some parts are abandoned, the cover is broken, most of the graves not recognisable any more. This is more like a representation of Buenos Aires, with its small community of immensely rich families and endless barrios of unknown poor or old people.