Recoleta Cemetery, the Top Tourist Attraction in Buenos Aires

Many people find it strange that a cemetery is a city's most popular tourist attraction. Paris has the Eiffel Tower, New York has Times Square, and Buenos Aires has Recoleta Cemetery.

For most visitors the drawing card that gets them to Recoleta Cemetery is that it's the final resting place of Eva Perón (known more popularly as Evita). She became famous to millions around the world partly through the dramatization of her life in an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical and the subsequent movie version starring Madonna. But the story after Evita's death and the odd journey her body took to multiple places around the world before finally being entombed in Recoleta Cemetery is even more fascinating than her life.

As the legendary first lady and Vice-President to Argentine President (and her husband) Juan Perón, Evita evoked a style and charisma that won her admiration from the masses. Her early death from cancer in 1952 at the age of 33 furthered the mystic surrounding her. Evita's body was embalmed in a way similar to Mao and Lenin so that she would be preserved and available for viewing by her adoring public for years. But after her husband was overthrown by a military coup, a new stage started in Evita's post-life journey. Fearing that her remains in Argentina would become a shrine to Peronism her body was stolen by the new government and secretly buried in Italy under a false name.

Years later a radical group in Argentina kidnapped the body of former president that ruled Argentina after Perón and demanded that the location of Evita's body be revealed. Her remains were then transferred to the home of her husband who was living in exile in Spain. After Juan Perón returned to Argentina in the early 1970s and was elected president for a third time her body was finally transferred to its current resting place in Recoleta Cemetery.

But finding Evita's tomb in Recoleta Cemetery isn't easy. Recoleta is the cemetery favored by the wealthy elite of Argentina, the very people who despised Evita and her husband. So, Evita isn't buried under the Perón name. The name over her tomb is her maiden name of Duarte. And even though everyone knows that most people coming to visit the cemetery are looking for Evita's tomb there are no signs pointing the way. It's common to walk around the cemetery and run into bewildered tourists asking, "Have you seen Evita?". Hint: she's off to the far left side of the cemetery.

People interested in the strange story of Evita's corpse will be interested in reading the novel "Santa Evita" by leading Argentine writer Tomás Eloy Martínez.

But Recoleta Cemetery is much more than just Evita. The hundreds of daily visitors to Recoleta rapidly become enchanted with the gorgeously carved mausoleums. Most of the mauseoleums are like miniature mansions and one can spend hours wandering through the cemetery.

A particulary haunting aspect of Recoleta Cemtery is that most coffins are visible through the clear glass panes of the mausoleums. The sight of these coffins, some more than a hundred years old are gruelish, terrifying to some but weirdly captivating to others.

Walking through Recoleta Cemetery is also a passage through the history of Argentina since most of the important people in Argentine history are buried in Recoleta. Presidents, dictators, writers, Nobel prize winners, and even a boxer are among those who found their final home in Recoleta.

You can wander among the mausoleums on your own with or without a self-guided map or take a walking tour to learn more about the cemetery and its inhabitants.

Outside of the cemetery walls the neighborhood of Recoleta, which is one of the wealthiest in the city, has capitalized on the tourists visiting the cemetery. There are a range of restaurants and nightclubs that line the street so that you can have an outdoor dinner while sitting across from the high brick cemetery walls and admiring the angelic carvings on the top of the mausoleums. And on weekends the park just outside the cemetery gates turns into one of the city's most popular arts and crafts fair with live bands performing just meters from the cemetery. It's certainly must be the world's most festive cemetery visting experience. Yet, oddly, none of the festivities seem out-of-place.

Undoubtedly, Recoleta is quite simply one of the most beautiful cemeteries in the world.