In this unsuspecting neighbourhood of Paraguay’s capital, the dead have seen more thieves than visitors.
I can’t really say that Asunción, the capital city of Paraguay, has very much to offer in the way of tourist attractions. Officially called Muy Noble y Leal Ciudad de Nuestra Señora Santa María de la Asunción (Very Noble and Loyal City of Our Lady Saint Mary of Assumption), Asunción only has a couple of museums and historical sites that don’t take very long to visit at all. That being said, one place definitively captivated me during my stay.
One evening I was drinking a beer at a local bar when I heard people talk about the Recoleta cemetery, which they described as one of the most beautiful graveyards in the city. My interest piqued, I grabbed my camera the next day to go for a walk in this 150-year-old resting place on a 33°C tropical winter day.
Once there, I was immersed into a world of paved little paths lined with splendidly colourful mausoleums decorated in ceramic tile and lush green trees. I also quickly noticed that none of the caskets were actually buried in the ground. They were all walled into crypts and mausoleums, exposed for everyone to see, sometimes behind a glass window, sometimes under a piece of fabric together with a photo.
But as I walked further away from the entrance of the cemetery, the beauty of the sight gave way to a much more macabre spectacle. Vaults in ruin, doors forced open, broken glass, destroyed caskets. Many of them lay half burnt on the cemetery’s alleyways, the heat of a fire still emanating from a few of them. Not much further, I saw corpses and bones littering the ground. I felt sick.
I managed to find two of the guardians, one must have been in his 30s, the other double his age. The youngest told me the cemetery got into this state because of grave looting. At 6PM, when the doors close, people climb the cemetery’s tall walls, light fires to keep warm and cook meals and then begin spoiling the tombs, taking whatever they can. “Jewels, obviously, but also bronze plaques,” the guardian said. Local media reports also mention metal-plated door handles, crosses, vases, even entire doors.
Paraguay has been experiencing chronic economic instability and corruption. Currently, about 27 percent of its population live under the poverty line. The guardians talk about the cemetery’s grim afterhours life with a mix of alarm and amusement. Above all, I feel a sense of powerlessness. A few days after my visit, I met a student in a bar who told me medicine students also sneak into the cemetery to find materials for their studies.
Despite the frequent looting, people are still regularly buried in Recoleta. A 2019 report by local newspaper ABC quotes a guardian as saying that the cemetery is guarded by 22 guards at a time, six per six hour shift. However, the cemetery is quite large and has 13 access gates, which makes it difficult to monitor. In January 2023, the mayor of Asuncíon doubled the city’s burial fees and promised to clean up Recoleta and reinforce its security. But to date, no improvements have been made.
Meanwhile, the families of the dead are struggling with how little the situation has evolved. Many families have begun opting for less appealing burial materials to deter potential thieves. Others are abandoning their tradition and culture of burying their loved ones above ground and opting for another cemetery in the city where they can rest six feet under.