Evita and the Cemetery of Recoleta

What could be the best way to spend a Sunday afternoon in Buenos Aires? On a sunny day there are two great possibilities: San Telmo with Plaza Dorrego for tango lovers and Feria de Mataderos for folklore lovers. But what if the day is grey, cold and rainy? The Cemetery of Recoleta is the perfect choice, and it doesn’t matter if you have been there many times before.

Cemetery of Recoleta is a part of the Recoleta neighbourhood, which is basically the home of all the rich people in Buenos Aires. There is just one road between buildings with the extremely expensive apartments and this cemetery with extremely expensive tombs and mausoleums.

Recoleta has tombs and mausoleums which are almost the size of a normal people’s house and it has been always fascinating to me how you can directly see coffins through the windows, which is obviously normal in Argentina. Maybe not quite normal to me, at least I am not used to seeing it…

And people who are buried here didn’t have a long way from their apartment to their final resting place – the only thing to do was to move to the other side of the road. Literally…

Probably all the famous and the rich people of Buenos Aires are buried here. There are lots of former Argentinian presidents, generals, politicians, writers.

But the most important person buried here is of course Eva Peron – Evita. Her tomb is always full of flowers from her admirers who come here all the time from all around the world. Eva Peron was Argentina’s first lady, people loved her a lot and she was almost more important that her husband, the president Juan Domingo Peron.

Evita died of cancer very young, at the age of 33, in 1952. After her death, she could not rest in peace. Due to the political changes in Argentina, her body has travelled all around the world. For some years she has been buried in Italy under a different name, then she was moved to Spain where she was kept in her husband’s house in the dining room.

The Cemetery of Recoleta became her final resting place many years later, and her tomb is now said to be so secure that it could withstand a nuclear attack. There is still a fear that the body will disappear again and the myth of Evita will reappear.