Jaunted

I used to hang out with people who thought you hadn't lived until you'd spent a couple of hours squatted on Jim Morrison's grave at Père-La chaise, humming the bass line from 'Riders on the Storm' and smoking Durban Poison with the Dutch kids who seemed to live there 24-7. And Jim, God rest his soul, was a fat drunk to whom Randy Jackson ('Bit pitchy in the middle there, dog') would have given short shrift. Death becomes him.

Buenos Aires has its own world class necropolis, El Cementario de la Recoleta, much smaller than Père-Lachaise but almost as star studded. The corpses of some of the most illustrious figures in Argentine history are in permanent storage here, interred in marble mausoleums the size of the average student bed-sit, albeit cleaner and with better facilities. I doubt whether Jim would have made the cut here. The preliminary interview might have gone something like this:

Cemetery bureaucrat So, Mr Morrison, we hear you'd like to be buried at Recoleta.

JM That's right, man.

CB Well, we're naturally very flattered you considered us. There's just one potential stumbling block. It says here that in 1969 you flashed your meat popsicle to the audience during a live concert in Miami. Any truth in this?

JM Well, listen, I was blitzed, man --

CB Look, what you do on stage in front of 50,000 people is none of my business or anyone else's. But here at Recoleta we have certain standards to uphold. We can't have anything like that going on here.

JM Even when I'm dead?

CB Well that's the usual demographic of our clientele.

JM But what about some of those other flakes you've got in there, man? Cats like Juan Manuel de Rosas and Facundo Quiroga, brutal tyrants responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocents during the bloody civil wars that tore Argentine society apart in the mid 19th century. Man.

CB Well, that's a different matter entirely. They were statesmen. You wouldn't have caught them with their breeches down even while they were putting women, children and Indians to the sword. We think you'll be much happier at La Chacarita cemetery with Carlos Gardel -- he was quite the exhibitionist too.

JM Fuck you man, I'm going to Paris.

Enough of that. Let's give this subject the seriousness it deserves. Because Recoleta Cemetery is one of the world's best tourist traps, a genuine must-see sight worth every column inch of hype it's ever generated. As you wander at dusk through the narrow streets of this city-within-a-city, flanked by dark granite monuments and lustrous bronze statuettes, your every soft and reverent step observed by cherubs, Virgin Marys and feral cats, your heartstrings tugged by the terse and moving Latin inscriptions, your senses soothed by the sweet smell of the floral tributes, and as the Japanese tourists plod their weary way hotelwards and leave the world to darkness and to you, surely then your mind will turn to a matter weightier than all the piffling concerns of our dreary, quotidian lives; an awesome power that separates man from beast, a force that permeates and transforms everything it touches...

Money.

That's right folks! Dinero! You'll find all kinds of ex-people in Recoleta Cemetery, from Formula One drivers (Juan Manuel de Fangio) to novelists (Adolfo Bioy Casares) to boxers (Luis Firpo) to any number of dead presidents, but as diverse a bunch as this may seem you don't have to be Karl Marx to work out that all of them were either upper class or rich and usually both. Even the afterlife, it seems, has a velvet rope policy.

For common people, oddballs, misfits and victims of freak accidents, BA other big boneyard, Chacarita, beckons. Here you'll find Carlos Gardel (tango genius, questions hanging over sexuality, plane crash), Oscar Bonavena (boxer, went 15 rounds with Ali, murdered in a Vegas brawl), Alforsina Storni (poet, suicide) and Alberto Olmedo (comedian, danced on a 12th floor balcony while coked off his head to impress his girlfriend, fell off).

And then, sui generis, there's Eva Perón, the woman who once exhorted her followers to `bomb Recoleta' (the barrio not the cemetery) and ended up buried there, much to the disgust of BA high society, who loathed her. Evita's black granite vault is one of the least impressive in the cemetery but by far the most visited. It took more than 20 years after her death for her corpse to be interred here in 1973 and even then it had to be slipped in at night to avoid a fuss. What happened to Evita's corpse between 1952 and 1973? For the full, mind-boggling story, get hold of a copy of Tomas Eloy Martinez' wry and riotous Santa Evita. It would make a good musical.

Epitaph: I think I've clinched the argument that cemeteries are more fun than theme parks (the queues to get in are definitely shorter), but yesterday, as I was wandering round Recoleta researching this silliness, a name on a spanking new granite plaque flashed out at me: García Belsunce. Her full name was María Marta García Belsunce and she was murdered in 2003 in her own bathtub at the exclusive Carmel Country Club in Pilar, by gunmen allegedly hired by her husband, Carlos Carrascosa. It's a case that's puzzled and gripped the country ever since, a real Larry King special. The trial is in progress right now, Carrascosa as stone faced as OJ, the verdict expected any day. María Marta was rich and upper class too. Lucky her.

Related Stories:
· Buenos Aires Tour [Jaunted]
· Buenos Aires Hotel Guide [HotelChatter]

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[Photos: Chris Wehling]