The Cemitério da Consolação, opened in 1858, is the oldest cemetery in São Paulo and effectively an outdoor museum of the city's history. Its tree-lined avenues are crowded with elaborate mausoleums and funerary sculpture commissioned from European and Brazilian artists by the coffee barons, industrialists, and political dynasties who built the city — marble angels, neoclassical temples, and Art Nouveau tombs.
Buried here are many of the figures who shaped São Paulo and Brazil, among them the writer Mário de Andrade, the painter Tarsila do Amaral, and the abolitionist Luís Gama. Free maps at the gate point out the notable graves, and a quiet hour wandering the rows is one of the more unexpected pleasures in the city — a green, contemplative space a block from the noise of Rua Augusta and Paulista.