Easily one of the most extraordinary cemeteries in the Americas, the municipal cemetery is a small fortified city in itself, a grid of mausoleums set among manicured cypresses clipped into perfect cylinders. The wealthy estancia families — Braun, Menéndez, Nogueira, Campos — built whole chapels for their dead, in styles ranging from Greek temple to Gothic Revival to Art Deco. The poorer Croatian, Spanish and British immigrants who built the city's working life lie in plainer rows around them.
The most quietly devastating section is the small memorial to the Selk'nam (Ona) people of Tierra del Fuego — the indigenous Patagonians effectively wiped out in the late nineteenth century by disease and by sheep-station bounty hunters. The cemetery sits about a fifteen-minute walk north of the Plaza along Avenida Bulnes, and is open daily until evening.