Cementario General

The entrance to the cemetery.

Well, this week has been pretty lame. I have basically been going to classes, eating, sleeping, reading, and going to class. I've almost exhausted all of the free-touristy things to do in Santiago. On Friday, we finally had another field trip planned. We went to the general cemetery of Santiago. At first, it sounds like kind of a strange field trip; my host mom thought IES staff were going crazy and getting lazy with ideas to teach us, however, it ended up being really interesting. My teacher described it as the perfect way to teach us culture and history in one fell swoop.

There were so many types of tombs. There were various sizes of mausoleums, basic tombs, underground mausoleums, and walls of coffins (I forget what they are called).

The cemetary was built by Bernado O'Higgins, a Chilean independence leader. Initially, it was built only for Catholics, but later, they decided to open it up to the public. There is a wall that divides the Catholic tombs from the non-Catholic tombs, you can tell because the names on the tombs go from being very Chilean and Latin American to being really, well, not Chilean. There are names like "Frankenstein" and "Reudlinger" on the other side of the wall, as opposed to "Sanchez-Velez" and "Gomez-Jarpa."

An Aztec tomb.

A Jewish tomb.

There was one tomb that was particularly interesting. It is a tomb of a woman, who is said to have fallen down a flight of stairs on her wedding day, and died. She died in love, but never got the chance to get married, therefore, it is said, that if you leave her a present, she will help you find love. Many school girls come to the cemetery to skip class and leave gifts to this woman.

To learn more about this tomb/story, you can visit this website:

http://www.orlitaromerogomez.blogspot.com/

(I visited the cite, I don't understand it though.)

All but three of the former presidents of Chile are buried in the same cemetery. One, Bernado O'Higgins, is buried in front of the presidential builing (La Moneda, I showed pics of it in my Chile v Espana post). They moved his remains from this cemetery to his new place because he played such an important role in Chilean hsitory. I can't remember which was the second president and why he isn't in the cemetery, but the third is former dicator Pinochet. His family had him incinerated and keeps his remains in their home our of fear that people would vandalize his tomb.

Salvador Allende's tomb.

Jose Manuel Balmaceda's tomb

Salvador Allende, who's portrait you saw in my Vaparaiso (aka: Valpo) post, is one of the most beloved presidents. He was overthrown my former dictator Pinochet. His tomb is one of the biggest in the cemetery. He is buried with his wife and daughter (and a few lesser known family members) in a great white mausoleum (kinda like Dumbledor's (!), but huge). Part of his speech to the public when he found out the country was going to be taken over by Pinochet is displayed on marbled by his tomb. The second picture is another president's tomb, who we have yet to learn much about.

The cemetery serves as a location for many memorials too. Mostly, it serves as a memorial for those who had fallen under the cruelty of the Pinochet dicatorship. Chile is celebrating it bicentennial as an independent country this year, and therefore is reconstructing all of the memorials. There is a vast difference between the memorial tombs and the tombs we first saw. They are much smaller and much more uniform. However, they are also more colorfully decorated from people coming to visit them.

During the dictorship, a certain group of people started gathering all of the bodies of those who died. They took them too the cemetery to be buried, although this was strictly forbidden by Pinochet. The owner of the cemetery was forced to hide what was going on, or else he would be killed. When questioned by Pinochet's army about all of the bodies being brought there, he lied and said he was just going to throw them in a big dump.

For those bodies who were never found, there is a giant memorial with the names of all of those lost and dead under the dictatorship. Salvador Allende's name, the first victim of the dictatorship, is in the middle of the memorial:

Another memorial form is remembering those who were never found during the dicatorship. One of the army units was almost completely lost, except for one. His tomb is in the cemetary, but "burning flames" decorate his tomb, with those names of all in his unit that were never found:

As Chile is a dominantly Catholic country, there are "shrines" dedicated to a certain saint, where the public will leave notes asking the saint to help them, or thanking the saint for helping them through a rough time in their life. There are shrines like this all over the city, for example there was one to the Virgin Mary at San Cristobal. They look like this:

Speaking of San Cristobal, you could see it, with the statue of the Virgin Mary, from the cemetery:

This weekend, I climbed the other hill in the middle of the city. It is called "Santa Lucia." I'll put pics of that up later.

Miss you all!

Nina