Argentina Tours & Travel | Sightseeing in Buenos Aires: The Recoleta Cemetery
Buenos Aires may be the only city in the world with a cemetery as its most popular tourist attraction. Some 4,700 elaborate tombs line the boulevards and side streets of the Recoleta Cemetery, a sprawling city that never wakes within a larger bustling one that never sleeps. It is a big draw for visitors with a camera on Argentina tours.
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Like London’s Highgate and Pere Lachaise of Paris, the Recoleta has its fair share of notable inhabitants, including national leaders, military heroes, Nobel Prize winners and important writers. With one major exception, however, most of these names are only vaguely recognizable to people outside Latin America. International visitors on Argentina tours come here mostly for the architecture.
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The stately Recoleta began as a modest graveyard. It was proposed by Torcuato de Alvear, Buenos Aires’ first Intendant, who, like his father, General Carlos de Alvear, is buried here along with his son, Marcelo Torcuato de Alvear, who served as president of Argentina from 1922 to 1928. Photographers on Argentina tours will appreciate the endless variety of the cemetery's monumental structures that today house the country's wealthiest citizens.
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Among the other Argentine presidents buried in the Recoleta are long-time leader, Hpolito Yrigoyen, and writer/president, Domingo Sarmiento. Here too is the ruthless dictator, Juan Manuel de Rosas, who began his career as a cattle rancher and became a national hero for ousting European forces with the help of the gauchos. He ruled Argentina off and on from 1829 to 1852 until he was overthrown and spent his final years in exile as a farmer on the English coast. His Southampton burial site was destroyed during World War II. Some years later, his remains were returned to Buenos Aires, though it is unknown whether it was de Rosas who ended up buried in the Recoleta or the livestock grazing nearby at the time of the bombing.
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Argentine heavy-weight fighter, Luis Firpo, is here. American boxing fans remember “the Wild Bull of the Pampas,” less for his wins than for a famous loss to Jack Dempsey when the Argentine challenged Dempsey for the heavyweight title in 1923.
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If you visit this cemetery during your travel to Argentina, you're likely find your way to its most famous citizen, the actress-turned-first-lady to President Juan Peron, Eva Duarte. Known affectionately as Evita, she rests in an art deco style tomb with a bronze door and an eternal light, much-visited on Argentina tours. As in most cemeteries, it can be challenging to locate a particular gravesite in the Recoleta, but in the case of Evita, most guidebooks offer easy-to-follow directions to the Duarte family tomb. You will not find her adoring husband at her side. To visit Juan’s gravesite on your Argentina tours, you’ll have to go across town to the Chacarita Cemetery where he is laid to rest in the Peron family tomb under his father’s name, Tomas. Plans call for the president's remains to be moved to a specially-built mausoleum.
