General Cemetery

During the period of the republic in the early 19^th century, our country was immersed in a society that was slowly growing, and which showed how people started arriving from the countryside to the city to find jobs and get a better life with good economic stability. That's why Santiago began to fill with people over the years and, during that time, the economic difficulties remained a major problem for our society, which made the deaths become higher than today.

On September 11^th, 1811 a priest named Juan Flores Pretes proposes to the Senate the idea of creating a public cemetery, which can help to clean up the city of bad smells and diseases because of the excess of decomposed bodies; most of them were in mass graves.

This project was finally approved, but it took ten years to be built and the choice of the place should have a favorable location for people and should be close to all. That's how the project takes place near Cerro San Cristobal.

On December 9^th 1821, president Bernardo O'Higgins inaugurated one of the largest and most beautiful cemeteries in America, which has 86 acres of land with approximately 2 million dead, among them are many important people, like some presidents, people who defended the human rights, wealthy families with great power, and also not-so emblematic people.

Benjamin Vicuña Mackenna and many others helped Cementerio General to become more advanced in its construction, and develop the idea of creating a city for the death, with several streets, avenues and many trees, but the health problem in the 19^th century was still there. This Sacred Place is now Recoleta.

It's known that the bodies that were buried in that place, especially those of the emblematic people and more affluent families, were buried with snow, because the body could be kept longer before breaking down. This lets us understand why in the old cemetery there are mausoleums, which are located at a shallow depth. In the other hand, the most important mausoleums are for the most important people. There you can see not only Chilean names, but also foreign people and ones with different ideologies. Among the mausoleums that we can highlight we find different architectonic styles like the Greeks, Egyptian, Romans, Arabs and Indo-American.

This City of the Dead was created right in the center of the capital because of a reason more important than the access to it: because there are different hospitals such as Hospital San José, J.J. Aguirre, the psychiatrist, the Faculty of Medicine of Universidad de Chile..., so the dead were buried immediately.

Another important place of Cementerio General is called “Muro de los detenidos desaparecidos”, which has the name of all the dead who were killed in Augusto Pinochet's government. This place is constantly visited by all the people who see that huge mural which has a great story.

This place is important for the country, because every grave, every space has great stories to be told, and this is appreciated in every corner of the cemetery.