Ok, a slightly morbid title I grant you, but the cemetary at Punta Arenas has to be one of the most impressive I've ever been to. The South Americans deal with death and grieving in a far more open way than we do - the coffins are largely on display (at least in the mausoleums), and are regularly swept by the locals, and almost all the graves are given fresh flowers every week, and many have pictures of the deceased on them and often their personal objects. What was so moving was the amount of graves from 1973/74 when the Pinochet regime began: Punta Arenas is a traditionally left-wing town so apparently many people were taken away and killed, their bodies only found much later in mass graves dug by the army. One of the teachers at the school I worked at told me that although many bodies were recovered, Pinochet ordered the exhumation of many of the mass graves in the late 1980s when he saw he was losing power, and had the army throw the bodies into the sea. This meant that many families, upon finding what they thought was the last restinig place, found instead empty holes in the ground, and are still desperately searching more than 20 years later. Also interesting was the amount of foreign families: the immigrant Croacians, Germans, Poles, English families, and the plaques commemorating ships which had sunk off the coast, most notably HMS Dotterel in the 1880s. The visit made for a fascinating and moving experience, a history of a town and also, one felt, of the entire country. As a note, the statue is of an Indian boy who was wrongly buried there (because he was not a Christian), and his grave is now a place for prayer and meditation and also of offerings of protection for the dead loved ones. If you touch his left hand it brings good fortune. I think the pictures here speak for themselves...
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