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La Recoleta Cemetery (Argentina, Buenos Aires)

Junín 1760, 1113 CABA, Argentina

Buried alive

The tragic story of 19 year old Rufina Cambaceres, a socialite who died suddenly in 1902. It was raining the day her casket arrived at Recoleta and was left in the Chapel over night. Legend has it that a cemetery worker noticed the casket had slightly moved and its lid out of place. They expected a grave robber.

However when her casket was opened the truth was much worse. Rufina still had all her jewelry, and now also had bruises and scratch marks on the inside of the lid: she had been buried alive and tried to scratch her way out of the casket in a panic. She had suffered an attack of cataplexy, which causes a comatose-like state, leading doctors to mistakenly believe she was dead.

In fact she died in the casket of a heart attack, due to the terrorising experience.

History

La Recoleta Cemetery, Argentina, Buenos Aires (Cementerio de la Recoleta) is a cemetery located in the Recoleta neighbourhood of Buenos Aires, Argentina. It contains the graves of notable people, including Eva Perón, presidents of Argentina, Nobel Prize winners, the founder of the Argentine Navy, and a granddaughter of Napoleon.

In 2011, the BBC hailed it as one of the world's best cemeteries and in 2013, CNN listed it among the 10 most beautiful cemeteries in the world. The monks of the Order of the Recoletos arrived in this area, then the outskirts of Buenos Aires, in the early eighteenth century.

The cemetery is built around their convent and a church, Our Lady of Pilar (Iglesia de Nuestra Señora del Pilar), built in 1732. The order was disbanded in 1822, and the garden of the convent was converted into the first public cemetery in Buenos Aires. Inaugurated on 17 November of the same year under the name of Cementerio del Norte (Northern Cemetery) those responsible for its creation were the then-Governor Martin Rodríguez, who would be eventually buried in the cemetery, and government minister Bernardino Rivadavia.

The 1822 layout was done by French civil engineer Próspero Catelin, who also designed the current facade of the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Cathedral.The cemetery was last remodeled in 1881, while Torcuato de Alvear was mayor of the city, by the Italian architect Juan Antonio Buschiazzo.

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