Documenting Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires since 2007
Author: Robert
By mid-2004 it seemed practical to convert my website about Argentina into a blog. Spending a lot of time in Europe for work didn’t help me develop projects about Buenos Aires, but I thought Recoleta Cemetery was too important & too interesting to leave neglected.
The biggest hurdle was having to learn to use yet another program. After teaching myself HTML, Javascript, Flash, Photoshop, & CSS, the last thing I wanted to do was learn how to use Adobe Illustrator. But it had to be done. I took a photo of the Nov 2003 map at the entrance gate, imported it to Illustrator & began to trace the general layout of the cemetery… a good way to learn to use the program.
Once the rough master copy was complete, I began going to the cemetery almost daily to compare & correct. It was much more work than I expected. As I counted the number of actual vaults vs. those on the map, the difference was enormous. What to do? The easiest approach seemed to be to divide the cemetery into sectors & walk every aisle, counting the number of vaults as I went. Each day I’d input changes so I wouldn’t forget what I’d seen. It made for some interesting posts on my blog, & mapping took several months to finish.
Some of the stages are below with the original traced map in orange & the corrected version in blue:
Read the complete story in the following posts titled “map development”: Part 1, Part 2, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6 & Part 7. Good news! The PDF guidebook is now available.
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“Here lies, Sir Francisco Antonio de Herrero, born the 25th of September of 1758, in San Miguel de Aras, mountains of Santander in Spain. He passed away the 6th of February of 1837, at the age of 78 years, 4 months & 11 days. He was a faithful husband, a refined & noble friend. This monument is consecrated in his memory, as a tribute of duty & gratitude. —His widow Madame Mercedes de Aramburu.”
Imagine one of the most beautiful girls in Buenos Aires high society—no more than 16 years old—& married off to a much, much older man. It was 1862 after all, & the odd couple was Felicitas Guerrero & Martín de Álzaga. Felicitas had one son from the marriage, but he died at the age of 6… hubby Martín passed away the following year. Nothing very out of the ordinary so far.
Felicitas still had her beauty & had also inherited a huge fortune. No wonder she became the object of every man’s attention in Buenos Aires. One of her suitors turned out to be extremely jealous. When he found out that Felicitas might have feelings for someone else, he went to her estate in the neighborhood of Barracas to demand an explanation. Felicitas obviously wasn’t very convincing because he shot her twice & she died the following day, 30 Jan 1872. Tragic. And today marks the anniversary.
The family fortune passed to the parents of Felicitas, & they built an enormous church in her memory. Over the years, a tradition developed that women come to the Iglesia de Santa Felicitas on January 30th, tie a ribbon to the gate & ask for help finding their true love. It’s a wonderful legend… Felicitas, Martín & their son are all buried in Recoleta Cemetery.
The tomb is fairly simple with 4 statues of women on each corner symbolizing either an aspect of virtue or mortality. A fancy wrought-iron gate is guarded by two lions:
The gorgeous Iglesia de Santa Felicitas faces Plaza Colombia in the neighborhood of Barracas. Afternoon is the best time to visit as the sun sets over the main façade:
