The Number One Tourist Attraction in Buenos Aires

I walked into the Recoleta cemetary briefly on my first trip to Buenos Aires, and wasn't ever all that interested in going back, no doubt largely because it's just crawling with tourists. But today I was walking by with my camera, so I spent some time there. It is just nutty, and it certainly does inspire some interesting thoughts. It's very much worth a visit.

The most interesting thing about this cemetary is that it's all above ground, all mausoleums. Little houses, really. Honestly, the whole thing feels like a miniature city full of dead people in really, really fancy miniature houses:


There are lots of little streets in this city of the dead, and some grand boulevards. (Grand in a miniature sense!) This is a pretty exclusive city, so almost all of the miniature houses are pretty fancy. Most of them have fancy columns and lots of them have statuary on top. But if you're a real hot-shot, you get yourself some prime real estate at a key intersection and build a little monument to yourself. Or rather, I suppose, your family builds you a monument when the time comes:


Of course the most famous person in this cemetery is Eva Peron. In fact, all the guide books and tourists pretty much call this "the cemetery where Eva Peron is buried." Of course, we know she's not buried at all -- she's in a box in her little house. Unfortunately, I had no patience to brave the crowd and get near her house. I did take a picture of the crowd though:
Some of the little houses have managed to get run down. I suppose the families have fallen on hard times and can't manage to send someone to keep the place up. A few of them in fact had broken panes of glass in their doors, which I found pretty surprising. Even more surprising was when I looked in one of these down-and-out mausoleums and saw eight or nine coffins stacked on pretty basic shelving. It seemed really incongruous, and more than a little illicit -- there I am, looking up-close at eight or nine coffins with eight or nine dead people in them, stacked up in a little room that looked like it could be a small storage room off of someone's garage:


I got this picture by just sicking the lens of my camera through the gate with the flash on. Again, this had a slightly illicit feel, so I didn't sit there and work go get good pictures! Note the dust on these coffins, a sign of hard times if ever there were one.

Walking around this cemetery got me thinking, of course. Mostly it got me thinking about how these very few rich people built themselves little temples, even after they were dead. But then of course, they didn't build the temples, their families did. I'm sure the dead people didn't care one way or another after they were dead. But the families did. So these little miniature temples, they're not for the dead or about the dead really -- they're for the families. They're little statements of each family's status, its power, and in the end, to a large extent, its money. Forget fancy cars and vacation homes -- at least those have some utility. These, on the other hand, and pure, unadulterated conspicuous consumption. They exist only to make a statement, a public statement. About -- you know what -- money, power, status. I guess these things are important, but, sheesh, come on, these people are dead.

So, anyway, I think this was my favorite thing in the Recoleta Cemetary: