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Northwest of Retiro and stretching all the way to Avenida Coronel Díaz, the well-heeled barrio of Recoleta is, for most Porteños, intrinsically tied to the magnificent La Recoleta Cemetery at its heart. Recoleta wasn’t always a prestigious place, though: until the end of the seventeenth century, its groves of Barbary figs were hideouts for notorious brigands. It wasn’t until the cholera and yellow fever epidemics of 1867 and 1871 that the city’s wealthy moved here from hitherto fashionable San Telmo. Although many of its residents have left for the northern suburbs in recent years, a Recoleta address still has cachet. Avenida Alvear is Buenos Aires’ swankiest street: along it you’ll find stately palaces, plus designer boutiques, swish art galleries and one of the city’s most prestigious hotels. Scattered throughout the barrio are a host of restaurants and bars, ranging from some of the city’s most traditional to trendy joints that come and go.
Recoleta’s other notable attractions include one of the capital’s few remaining colonial buildings, the gleaming white Basílica Nuestra Señora del Pilar; the Centro Cultural de Recoleta; and the country’s biggest and richest collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes.
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La Recoleta Cemetery
La Recoleta Cemetery
In around 1720, drawn to the area’s tranquillity, which was deemed perfect for meditation or “recollection” (hence the name), Franciscan monks set up a monastery in present-day Recoleta. A hundred years later, after the monks had been ejected by the city governor, La Recoleta Cemetery, at Avenida Quintana and Junín, was created in the monastery’s gardens. One of the world’s most remarkable burial grounds, it presents an exhilarating mixture of architectural whimsy and a panorama of Argentine history. The giant vaults, stacked along avenues inside the high walls, resemble the rooftops of a fanciful Utopian town from above. The necropolis is a city within a city, a lesson in architectural styles and fashions, and a great place to wander, exploring its narrow streets and wide avenues of yews and cypress trees.
The tombs themselves range from simple headstones to bombastic masterpieces built in a variety of styles including Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Secessionist, Neoclassical, neo-Byzantine and even neo-Babylonian. The oldest monumental grave, dating from 1836, is that of Juan Facundo Quiroga, the much-feared La Rioja caudillo (local leader) immortalized in the Latin American classic Facundo by Argentine statesman and writer Domingo Sarmiento, also buried here. Facundo’s tomb stands straight ahead of the gateway. Next to it, inscribed with a Borges poem, stands the solemn granite mausoleum occupied by several generations of the eminent Alvear family. The vast majority of tombs in Recoleta belong to similar patrician families of significant means – but not all. Perhaps the most incongruous statue in the cemetery is that of a boxer, in the northwest sector – the final resting place of Angel Firpo, who fought Jack Dempsey for the world heavyweight title in 1923. Military heroes, many of them Irish or British seafarers who played a key part in Argentina’s struggle for independence, are also buried here, such as Admiral William Brown. An Argentine hero of Irish origins, at the beginning of the nineteenth century Brown decimated the Spanish fleet in the River Plate estuary. An unusual monument decorated with a beautiful miniature of his frigate, the Hercules, is a highlight of the cemetery’s central plaza.
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Evita’s final resting place
Evita’s final resting place
Recoleta cemetery’s most famous resident is undoubtedly Evita Perón, second wife of President Juan Perón and one of Argentina’s most enduring figures, who died in 1952. Given the snobbishness surrounding the cemetery – the authorities who preside over it treat it more like a gentlemen’s club than a burial ground – it’s hardly surprising that Porteño high society tried to prevent Evita’s family from laying her to rest here. Nevertheless, her family’s plain, polished black granite vault, pithily marked Familia Duarte and containing poignant quotes on bronze plaques from her speeches, has been her resting place since the 1970s – with the coffin supposedly inside concrete to prevent it from disappearing. Unlike many other graves, it’s not signposted (the cemetery authorities are still uneasy about her presence) but you can locate it by following the signs to Sarmiento’s, over to the left when you come in, then counting five alleyways farther away from the entrance, and looking out for the pile of bouquets by the vault.
