The cemetery doesn’t really belong to Eva Peron, and there are no signposts to her grave though there are signposts to the grave of others. It doesn’t matter because the tour groups flock to Evita’s grave. Though stories tell of heaps of fresh flowers at her crypt, though we saw only one fresh flower and a few plastic blooms. Other tombs include the founders and statesmen of Argentina and the wealthy, though many of the names on the splendid tombs no longer sound familiar.

Recoleta cemetery is in better condition than the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, with workers busy cleaning and restoring tombs. At the same time, there are tombs that are empty except for buckets and ladders. Who decides which tombs are maintained and which are abandoned? One reason that Pere Lachaise is in much worse shape than Recoleta is that it is much larger and the tombs are spread out more, meaning there is grass and a bit of parkland, while only a few trees and potted plants are present at Recoleta, a compact city of tombs.

Now we’ll all recite a verse of Ozymandias.