Let us peep within. In the upper chamber stands an elaborate altar of alabaster and brass, with an enamelled painting of the Virgin and Holy Child, encased in a massive frame of brass, before which, on the lace altar-cloth, spotlessly clean, are burning several candles. There are two or three prie-dieus of mahogany and various wreaths of real flowers hung on the walls, as well as others of beads or immortelles. Below, down a flight of marble stairs with brass balustrades, one can see on shelves around the chamber, six, eight, perchance a dozen coffins, and several marble busts, portraits of the more notable occupants of the coffins, placed on pedestals, against which are heaped more wreaths. Every detail of the tomb is perfect in its way and no expense has been spared in the making of it. It is scrupulously clean, for here come dainty ladies to kneel on the praying chairs for an hour at a time, and on All Souls’ Day or the Day of the Dead (El dia de los muertes) the family interested in the tomb will pass most of the day here. Fifteen thousand dollars would probably be a fair estimate of the cost of this little palace of death—a few square yards in one of the main avenues of Recoleta will outvalue the same space in Florida!—but it remains a charnel house and it smelleth of things unclean. I often thought that the mourning ladies seen in these tombs were another of the many traces of the Moorish dominion in Spain that still show in the customs of Spanish America.
The English “Pro-Cathedral” in Calle 25 de Mayo, Buenos Ayres.
The Roman Catholic Cathedral in the Plaza Mayo, Buenos Ayres.
(Note the wreaths of electric bulbs which permanently entwine the columns of the building.)
When I tell you that in Recoleta there are some ten thousand tombs, huddled together so closely that it is hardly possible to get an unembarrassed view of a single one, and that many of them are quite as splendid as the one I have described, you will understand what a prodigious expenditure Recoleta represents. Millions of money, much good taste and more bad, have gone to its making.
Every kind of stone seems to be used: alabaster, marbles, granites, freestone; and all have been imported from Europe. Nearly everything of artistic merit bears evidence of European craftsmanship. There is abundance of beautiful iron-work and bronze plaques, medallions, statues. The debased modern Italian work is very noticeable. Almost every atrocity is of Italian origin. But there are several mausoleums of black granite, in the style of Germany’s art nouveau, which show how beautifully that may be treated. They are so individual and yet so restrained and dignified that the good taste of the owners is as evident in them as the skill and genius of the designers. Strange to say, few of these really beautiful things bear the makers’ name, yet every ramshackle erection of the jerry-builders in the streets of Buenos Ayres displays in large concrete letters the name of the proud architects who committed it!
Naturally, in Recoleta repose many of the notable men in the recent history of Argentina. The great heroes, such as Belgrano, San Martín, Sarmiento, sleep elsewhere in lonely state; but here are many presidents, generals, statesmen, mingled with the rabble of the merely rich. There is also a quadrangle stuffed with hundreds of coffins let into niches in the walls, tier above tier, up to some thirty feet in height, but that is mossy and neglected, as it recalls the old days before the coming of the “boom”; yet it is there that the real “forefathers of the city sleep”; there you will find the true blue Argentine who in life to-day is rara avis.