Chacarita Cemetery Legends

The gray granite gate of Chacarita Cemetery stands as a heavy, neoclassical screen between the city and the largest green space in Buenos Aires. It opened in eighteen seventy-one because the city’s other cemeteries could not hold the…

A bronze statue of Carlos Gardel leans back against his tomb in Chacarita Cemetery, cigarette forever pressed between his fingers. He holds the same casual, confident pose he kept on stage during his rise to fame as the king of tango. The…

A glass-fronted niche holds a permanent shrine for Gilda, the Argentine cumbia singer who died in a nineteen ninety-six bus crash. Visitors crowd the narrow path to press photos, letters, and small trinkets against the tempered glass of…

The mausoleum of Gustavo Cerati in Chacarita Cemetery features a life-sized bronze sculpture of the musician standing with his guitar, his right hand raised as if greeting the crowd. Cerati, the lead singer of Soda Stereo and a defining…

The Panteón de Actores inside Chacarita Cemetery wears a heavy, bronze entrance door sculpted with tragic and comic theater masks. It serves as the final resting place for the legends of Argentine stage and screen. When the Actors…

The monument to Alfonsina Storni in the Chacarita Cemetery is a bronze sculpture of a woman resting, set against a jagged, wave-like slab of granite. Storni was a poet who walked into the sea at Mar del Plata in nineteen thirty-eight. Her…

The tomb of Osvaldo Pugliese is marked by a heavy bronze piano lid that sits atop the grave, cast with the musician’s signature. During the military dictatorship, his orchestra was banned from performing, and colleagues would leave an…