Chacarita Cemetery

This guide to Chacarita Cemetery in Buenos Aires opens with the 1871 yellow fever epidemic that overwhelmed Buenos Aires's gravediggers and shut the gates of Recoleta to the sick. It follows engineer Augusto Ringuelet's funeral railway, built in just eleven days by seven hundred men, and La Porteña, the locomotive that had opened Argentina's first railway back in 1857, now running twice daily toward this empty stretch of pampa. Its English driver was a man named John Allan, who had steered that very first inaugural run as a young man.