The history of Recoleta Cemetery

The history of Recoleta Cemetery begins with a religious order. It was the Recollect friars, settling here early in the 18th century, who gave the district its name.⁶ Their church, Our Lady of the Pillar, opened in 1732 and was declared a National Historic Monument in 1942;⁷ it still stands beside the cemetery gate.

The friars chose a site on the edge of the city, in keeping with their rule of retreat and seclusion, and planted an orchard behind their convent. That orchard is where the cemetery was later built, as the City of Buenos Aires explains.² The convent building survives too, much altered, as today's Recoleta Cultural Centre.⁸

The friars' time ended with the church reforms of Bernardino Rivadavia's day, which took many religious properties into public hands. The convent passed to the State in 1822, after the reform of the church orders,⁹ and the national monuments commission records that the orchard was an area outside the city walls expropriated during those same reforms.¹⁰ The land was ready for a new purpose, and a growing city badly needed a burial ground away from its churches and crowded center.

Recoleta became fashionable because of an epidemic. After frequent cholera outbreaks and above all the yellow fever of 1871, the richest families of the south of the city moved north and settled this area, the tourism board explains.¹² The same epidemic forced the city to build new cemeteries to cope with the number of deaths.¹³

One victim of that year lies here as a hero. Francisco Muñiz, a doctor, lost his life in 1871 caring for the fever's victims,²⁴ and the commission remembers him as the pioneer of Argentine natural history.²⁵ His later monument by Ettore Ximenes shows an allegorical figure holding the rod of Asclepius,²⁶ a fitting tribute to a doctor who gave his life to his patients.

By the late 19th century the new residents of the district had adopted Recoleta as their family burial place.²⁷ The definitive shaping of the neighborhood was the work of the city's first mayor, Torcuato de Alvear.²⁸ The church, the cemetery and the former convent came to form one architectural ensemble rich in history.²⁹

The turn of the century gave the cemetery its famous face, the one that fills postcards and phone screens today. The country was growing rich, and the tourism board describes the great families racing one another to build the grandest pantheon.³⁴ The commission adds that they competed in height, with domes, small temples, peristyles and elaborate sculpture.³⁵

European artists answered the call. Paris and Genoa set the fashion, the commission notes,³⁶ and famous chisels came with it: Coutan made Avellaneda's monument in 1908,²¹ and Mercié signed Pellegrini's mausoleum, raised in 1913.²² In the 1920s a series of Art Deco mausoleums followed,¹⁴ adding a modern note to the marble streets.

Politics was carved into the stone too. The monument for the dead of the 1890 rising, drawn by Courtois in 1892,³⁷ became in time the tomb of party leaders Alem, Yrigoyen and Illia.³² Monuments like this one show how the cemetery recorded the country's political battles as well as its private griefs. Our page on architecture and sculpture goes through the styles and the sculptors in detail.

Are people still buried in Recoleta Cemetery? Yes. The city's operations office for the cemetery is charged with arranging burials in graves, vaults, pantheons and niches under the rules in force,⁵ and a city office handles the registration, transfer and concessions of vaults.⁴⁶ There is no cremation service on site.⁴⁷

That is why the rules about respect matter. Families still own vaults and visit them, and you may see a burial or a family at a door during your visit. The cemetery is also a public heritage site: its own staff run free Spanish tours on the hour,²³ and it counts more than 200 figures of Argentine history among its graves.⁴⁸

Recoleta also has a sister cemetery with a different character. The tourism board calls Recoleta the more aristocratic necropolis, the one most tourists visit,⁴⁹ while Chacarita, opened after the yellow fever of 1871 forced the city to build new cemeteries,¹³ became the resting place of other important figures, among them the tango singer Carlos Gardel.⁵⁰ Together they tell the city's story from both ends, and a visit to each rounds out the portrait of Buenos Aires.