Recoleta Cemetery

When the Recollect friars were expelled from Buenos Aires in 1822, their convent garden beside the church of Nuestra Señora del Pilar became the city’s first public cemetery, laid out by the French engineer Próspero Catelin. Towards the end of the 19th century, as wealthy families moved into the surrounding district, it became the necropolis of Argentina’s elite. Today it is a walled city of nearly 4,700 vaults along paved “streets,” built in every style from neoclassical to Art Nouveau and Art Deco, often in marble imported from Italy; more than 90 are national historic monuments. Presidents, generals, Nobel laureates and Eva Perón lie here.

Its most famous story belongs to Rufina Cambacérès, the daughter of the novelist Eugenio Cambacérès and Luisa Bacichi. On 31 May 1902, her 19th birthday, she collapsed at home while getting ready to go out for the evening; doctors declared her dead and she was buried the next day. Soon afterwards, the story goes, a cemetery worker found her coffin lid shifted and broken – and the family feared the worst. In the version told by guides and by the city’s own tourism office, workers heard screams from the vault and, when the coffin was opened, found scratch marks on its lid and on her face: Rufina had suffered a cataleptic fit and been buried alive.

There is no contemporary evidence for the most dramatic version. A 1902 obituary in Caras y Caretas recorded her sudden death, but the scratches and screams appear only in later retellings, and Recoleta specialists have noted other explanations for a disturbed coffin, including grave robbers after the jewellery she was said to be buried with. Rumours of a romance between Rufina and her mother’s partner, the future president Hipólito Yrigoyen, are likewise unsupported. What is certain is the extraordinary tomb her mother commissioned: an Art Nouveau mausoleum with a life-size marble statue of Rufina, one hand resting on the door, as if about to step out.

Recoleta has other legends too: a long-serving gravedigger, David Alleno, whose keys are said to be heard jangling along the paths at dawn, and the tomb of Liliana Crociati, a 26-year-old killed on 26 February 1970 when an avalanche struck her hotel in Innsbruck, Austria, during a honeymoon ski trip, whose statue stands beside one of her dog. Visitors leave flowers for Rufina and touch the statue’s hand.

The ghost stories are, for most visitors, a small part of a remarkable place – an open-air museum of Argentine history and funerary art. Buenos Aires has experimented with evening tours, but the cemetery is generally visited by day; please respect its families and its working role as a burial ground.

Legends rather than investigations: Rufina Cambacérès said to have woken in her coffin; the sound of jangling keys near the tomb of a former gravedigger; and occasional reports of cold spots and whispers among the vaults.

Rufina’s Art Nouveau tomb near the cemetery’s main avenues, the Duarte family vault where Eva Perón lies, and the tomb of Liliana Crociati. Night-time stories are tied to the hours after closing.

Rufina’s story is the best-known legend of Buenos Aires, retold by tour guides and in a 2006 documentary, No hay más sombras, and in songs and television. The cemetery is one of the city’s most visited sights, regularly listed among the world’s most beautiful cemeteries.