Buenos Aires has two famous cemeteries: Recoleta, a well-known tourist spot with guided tours and paid entrance, and Chacarita, which is less well-known and still in use for burials, funerals, and cremations.
For outsiders, they are basically tourist attractions. I visited Chacarita under different circumstances, a funeral, and was impressed. I had never seen so many mausoleums in one place, forming a kind of miniature city.
However, I was also unsettled because despite the grandeur of the stone structures, decay stood out the most. Most of the mausoleums were abandoned with broken doors and disturbed coffins. In some cases, bones were exposed.
I also learned that these tombs have underground floors. Through the forcibly opened doors, you could see how deep they were, with generation after generation of the dead.
It was a disturbing image.
But what really bothered me was the neglect. I don't know if it's the best word to describe what I saw, but, for lack of a better one, I'll use "neglect."
I imagine most of those families still exist, but they choose not to maintain the mausoleums. Perhaps caring for such large, ostentatious structures no longer makes sense.
From the outside, it certainly seems like an unnecessary expense, especially for distant generations with no connection to the living.
At the same time, neither the state nor the cemetery administration intervenes.
The result is a touristy, and morbid, display of decay.
I think that's where my discomfort comes from. From a distance, the mausoleums appeared prestigious and eternal. But up close, they revealed abandonment, violation, and forgetfulness.
It was as if the meaning they once held had been emptied out. What once represented power and memory is now nothing more than ruins.
