Among luxurious crypts and lazy cats, there are some women who break through the inevitable. Living women who appear to be dead, ghosts drawing people's attention, meet at the famous cemetery to give others something to talk about.
Like an eternal traveler's trunk, the walls of Recoleta Cemetery keep anecdotes from the past, miniature cathedrals, and above all, extraordinary tales made of marble. Among mausoleums of very different styles, sumptuous cenotaphs, and undaunted sculptures, passions and revenges take place once and again in the timelessness of the never ever.
The necropolis, founded in 1822, houses hundreds of artists, politicians, and national heroes. However, if you walk along its corridors, history soon intermingles with urban legend. According to the tale, the daughter of novelist Eugenio Cambaceres was buried during a cataleptic attack and, when she woke up, panic-stricken, she had a heart attack. Therefore, her "second death" is represented by a languid statue that is trying to go out of the family's vault.
This gloomy version of the sleeping beauty joins the ghostly apparitions in which women are also the protagonists. “The Lady in White” is probably the most renowned of them, but many keepers swear that some nights Napoleon's granddaughter, count Alexandre Walewski's daughter, can also be seen crying in the arms of her godmother.
The cemetery's myths and truths reveal a past of grandeur and disgrace, while they also blur the boundaries between the dark and the beautiful, the living and the dead. A proof of this is Eva Peron's mausoleum. The always fresh flowers suggest that, in the social imaginary, she continues to be alive.