Country Article / Postcards
Buenos Aires' Best Final Address
Date: 05/25/2005
Like fellow International Living readers Carolyn and Jim Taggart ("First Time in Buenos Aires"), I, too, recently visited Buenos Aires for the first time. When they mentioned Recoleta Cemetery and Eva Peron in their postcard, my eyes lit up: my visit to Recoleta, and especially the cemetery there, was one of the highlights of my trip. This cemetery is a veritable "ciudad de los muertos," or city of the dead, laid out in a grid pattern of "streets." The tombs run the gamut from tall (15 feet high!) to short, wide to narrow. Some show Greek or Egyptian influences among numerous other architectural designs. Some have small glass recesses where the noble features of the deceased are immortalized in stone or metal busts. Some display the occupants' noteworthy accomplishments during life on laudatory plaques. Though a few of the tombs are simple, most are ornate; after all, the point of securing a privileged final resting place in Recoleta Cemetery is to flaunt to the upper-crust world of Buenos Aires that you definitely "had it." The fact that Evita Peron, born of humble origins in a provincial town, lies within Recoleta Cemetery is a tribute to the strenuous efforts of her Peronista supporters to inter her much-traveled body there over the objections of the conservative elite. Once you've finished gazing at Evita's tomb along with the other tourists, look around to discover another Recoleta cemetery attraction--its cats! Like the Coliseum in Rome, Recoleta has a thriving population of feral and semi-wild house cats. All sorts of pure- and mixed-breed felines roam the cemetery's four-city-block area, from calicos to loud Siamese to sleek, panther-like black ones. They leap with ease from one tomb-top to the next. Though wary of humans, some can be seen sipping at small saucers of milk just outside the grounds or nibbling at chop-bones left for them inside. The irony of the cat tale is that outside the cemetery grounds, the surrounding upscale streets of the Recoleta district, filled with elegant boutiques and hotels, expensive apartment blocks, and fine restaurants, are experiencing a rat problem, according to the English language Herald (May 2005). Inside the cemetery, of course, there's not a rodent to be seen. Bert Brun For International Living
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