From aristocratic vault to café: Buenos Aires tenders old tombs at La Recoleta cemetery

—It’s behind that pine, a little further on. Past Evita’s grave.

The man giving directions is sweeping the white marble floor on a cloudy Wednesday morning at La Recoleta Cemetery, the most aristocratic neighborhood in Buenos Aires. The directions take one to the vault that once belonged to the Girado family, a surname on the very small list of Argentina’s landed bourgeoisie in the 19th and 20th centuries, and which will soon be repurposed as a grab-and-go gift shop and café. The Government of the City of Buenos Aires has published a tender for the concession of use and “commercial operation” of that space, originally designed to house 12 tombs.

Built in 1822 as Buenos Aires’ first public cemetery, La Recoleta Cemetery is a reminder of an era when the country was an emerging economic power and the city’s leading families competed with each other to build lavish mausoleums. Many of these are now in ruins, with broken glass, mold and exposed coffins. That is the case with the Girado vault, which borders the wall facing Junín Street and is neighbors with the Álzaga family pantheon —another patrician surname— where the remains of the famed Felicitas Guerrero de Alzaga rest: she the country’s youngest, richest and most beautiful widow, murdered in 1872 by a suitor.

A little further on is the tomb where Eva Perón’s body was finally laid to rest after a long journey, and also —with its obelisk and the bronze condor that crowns it— that of former president Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, author of one of the foundational works of Argentine literature, Facundo. Nearby are the remains of writer Adolfo Bioy Casares, but not those of his friend and colleague Jorge Luis Borges, who died in Switzerland, even though he had expressed a wish to be buried in his family pantheon in La Recoleta, in the same grounds as the “fathers of the nation.”

According to the public tender, the concession for the vault —which covers roughly 25 square meters— will be granted for a five-year term and may host a gift shop, a food and beverage outlet and a “rest and support area” for visitors who book the new nighttime tour service. In exchange, a monthly fee of 1.6 million pesos (just over $1,070) will be charged, plus 20% of gross revenues from operating the nighttime tours.

The café will operate only as takeout, with no tables or chairs allowed and no on-site food preparation. Although the tender explicitly allows that possibility, city government sources say “there is no chance that the space will be considered a café.” “As in other cities around the world, the City tendered a space to establish a gift shop in La Recoleta Cemetery, and it will join the trend of expanding cultural and service offerings as seen in the cemeteries of Vienna, Dublin, Berlin and London,” they said. The site currently receives an average of 1,816 visits per day.

More than 90 vaults have been declared National Historic Monuments and the cemetery’s architecture is legally protected, so only restoration work is permitted. An annex to the tender includes two images: one of the vault’s current condition, labeled the “before,” and another generated with artificial intelligence showing a possible “after.” There are no structural changes, but a fresh coat of paint and the removal of commemorative plaques that still survive on the pantheon’s eroded walls are shown: the plaque reading “To engineer Francisco J. Girado from his colleagues and friends of the Pelota Club of Chascomús,” dated 1934, and the one remembering Federico M. Girado, signed “from his classmates at the National College” in 1913.

The vault was recently returned to the city government after an administrative procedure. City government sources said it had been available for 10 years and that all steps required by burial laws were followed (the same legislation that prohibits “any commercial activity, in its different forms” within cemeteries), a procedure that provides for notifying rights holders and giving them the opportunity to file legal challenges in advance. Although they did not specify the fate of the human remains, the law states that if relatives do not remove them, they should be sent to the common ossuary or communal crematorium.

This past Wednesday the vault was cordoned off with yellow fences put up by the City Government and guarded by four security guards who not only refused to confirm the identity of the vault behind them, but who also tried to mislead approaching journalists. “You can’t take photos and you must leave, we are in the middle of a conflict right now,” one of them said. On Tuesday, when local media published news of the tender, a journalist named Gabriel Levinas went inside the vault and recorded at least a dozen coffins still inside. He later wrote that a cemetery employee told him some had been moved and showed a photo of a wheelbarrow loaded with coffins.

The man sweeping the white marble floor of one of the vaults that still receives care from its lineage says the uproar started because “the owners are against” the tender. They are upset by the idea of people wandering around during a funeral with a coffee in their hand. “They are going to file a complaint. And these are important people,” he warns. Asked by EL PAÍS, the city government did not specify whether it had received any formal complaints so far.

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