So here we are in sunny Buenos Aires – 13 hours and 30oC away from the gloomy days of an English winter – at the start of a 3 week tour of Argentina.
Robin and I arrive at 8.30am after an overnight flight and it’s already hot, hot, hot. To make the most of our time in the capital, we have arranged for a guided tour of the city and thank goodness our lovely guide, Veronica, turns up in an air-conditioned car.
By lunchtime she has whisked us around BA’s most iconic sites and filled us in on the country’s recent political history and current state of affairs.
First stop is Recoleta cemetery – an extraordinary city of the dead, where street after street of marble clad mausoleums extend many feet below the ground to house members of the city’s grandest families in the same luxury in death as they expected in life. It’s not a coincidence that the cemetery is sited in BA’s most expensive neighbourhood. Such splendour doesn’t come cheap – one mausoleum sold for US$80,000 recently, and there’s an annual service charge on top to keep the marble polished and the cobwebs away. We peer in through one open door and marvel at the ornate altar and the gilded mosaic ceiling. While another open door reveals two rows of coffins stacked at least five high, with room for five more on top.
Eva "Evita" Peron, the former president’s wife immortalised by Andrew Lloyd Webber, has the honour of the most visited tomb, though it is by no means the grandest. And she was only laid to rest here 30 years after her death, and after her embalmed body had been snatched by rival political groups, mutilated and smuggled out of the country to Italy, before being returned to her exiled husband in Spain. Even after his return to Argentina, it was many years before Evita’s remains returned to their final resting place.
