People are just dying to get into this place!

Last Sunday, Damien and I took a guided historical tour of Recoleta Cemetery and Recoleta District. Recoleta is the most prestigious district of Buenos Aires (comparable to Knightsbridge in London, Mosman in Sydney and (I guess) the Upper East Side in New York City (I don’t know NYC that well). It’s full of grand old French-style mansions, most of which have now been converted into 5 Star hotels, Embassies or Flagship Stores for big brands such as Ralph Lauren.

Recoleta is also home to one of the most well-known Cemeteries in the world too – Recoleta Cemetery. BA’ers love to come to this Cemetery at the weekends to pay homage to their history and their heroes. The cemetery is huge and houses thousands of family tombs and mausoleums belonging to Buenos Aires’ rich and famous (including ex-presidents, political activists, national heroes). The most famous probably belongs to the Duarte Family where Eva Peron (finally) rests in peace.

Some of you may think a Cemetary is a weird place to head on your first weekend in a new place but a guided tour around this cemetery gave us a very intensive lesson on the history of Argentina, the lives of Argentinians and BA'ers over the past 200 years - and some info on housing (and mausoleum) prices in BA! A mausoleum here starts on average at around US$50,000 – the same as an average price of an average apartment in an average area in Buenos Aires – plus the living members of the family pay annual land taxes and maintenance fees. In the last few years, many families have decided to sell their mausoleums (and move their families’ coffins to cheaper ‘lodgings’ outside of the city) and buy apartments instead.

If you’re from BA and your family can afford a family mausoleum here then you’ve really made it!

This is the 'main drag' of the cemetery. Mausoleums cost more here!

Some of the more ornate mausoleums – they go many storeys below ground and some even have their own chapels housed within them. The most valuable mausoleum is valued at US$1 million!  

                                       Some of the huge French-style mansions of Recoleta