Dead famous

Cemeteries as tourist attractions, and some of the best

Why do we go to cemeteries? Should we go to cemeteries? And by ‘go’ here I mean for pleasure, or leisure, and not because we’re being carried there in a box. It’s generally a goal of life to avoid the cemetery, to delay your final arrival there for as long as possible. It’s why we eat vegetables and go on runs and pump some iron and yet when we’re alive we seem to flock to them like geese.

If you don’t believe me or think I’m overplaying it then please just have a look at this Lonely Planet guide: an ethical traveller’s guide to graveyards. The fact that a guide like that has been written assumes that there may be some unethical travellers lurking amongst the catacombs, which is disappointing, not to say alarming, but it also shows it really isn’t just me you’ll find there.

Because yes, I’m a cemetery-goer. I don’t know when my reaction to seeing that a city or town I’m visiting has a good graveyard became to exclaim, “oh, that’s great!” But that is frequently what I shout when said city or town has a graveyard that is considered good enough to visit even while still alive and without any friends or relatives finding themselves underground there.

The “good enough” is key within that last paragraph, though. We don’t want regular dead people, we want dead people that are covered with pretty stones or tombs or even in catacombs. We preferably want at least some of these dead people to be famous, as that adds another level to our cemetery visit.

We want to stand next to an ornately carved headstone and say, yep, this is where Oscar Wilde is. Or George Michael. Or Eva Perón. Or anyone really that we didn’t know, per se, but that we knew of.

There are lots of graveyards that are like this, beautiful and serene and chock full of the dead famous, and this is what this travel guide is all about. Should you prefer to visit tourist sites that mainly feature people who are still alive, this may not be the one for you.

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