Before this cemetery existed, Lima's dead were buried beneath churches. Crypts and catacombs beneath the city's convents and cathedrals held centuries of remains, a practice so entrenched that the public resisted any alternative. The General Cemetery of Lima, inaugurated on May 31, 1808, under Viceroy Jose Fernando de Abascal, was the first civil cemetery in the Americas. Its designer was Matias Maestro, a priest from Vitoria-Gasteiz in Spain's Basque Country who had arrived in Peru in the late 18th century. Originally a businessman, Maestro became a Catholic priest in 1793 and threw himself into renovating Lima's churches in the fashionable neoclassical style. He laid out the cemetery with geometric precision -- symmetrical avenues, radiating paths, orderly rows of barracks, chapels, and parks. An octagonal chapel, later demolished, stood at the center, its interior painted with murals by Jose del Pozo, a Sevillian artist who had arrived in Peru with the Malaspina scientific expedition.

Walking through the cemetery today is like passing through a museum of 19th- and 20th-century European and Peruvian sculpture. The grounds hold 766 mausoleums and 92 historical monuments. Works by the Spanish sculptor Damia Campeny stand alongside pieces by the French artists Louis-Ernest Barrias and Antonin Mercie. Italian sculptors -- Ulderico Tenderini, Giovanni Battista Cevasco, Pietro Costa, and Rinaldo Rinaldi -- contributed monuments that were celebrated in the artistic circles of their time. Peruvian sculptors of the mid-20th century left their own marks: Romano Espinoza's funeral monument to President Luis Miguel Sanchez Cerro, Luis Agurto's bronze sculptures for the mausoleum of President Oscar R. Benavides, and Eduardo Gastelu's Pastor Fry mausoleum. Each All Saints' Day, the cemetery transforms into a performance space where actors stage Jose Zorrilla's Don Juan Tenorio among the tombs.

The list of notable burials reads like a compressed history of the Peruvian republic. More than thirty heads of state rest here, from Jose de la Riva Aguero, Peru's first president, to Manuel Prado Ugarteche, who served in the mid-20th century. Writers Ricardo Palma and Jose Carlos Mariategui -- the same man who orchestrated Rouskaya's midnight dance -- lie here alongside poet Jose Santos Chocano and novelist Ciro Alegria. The cemetery also holds the remains of engineer Ernest Malinowski, who built the staggeringly high Central Railway through the Andes, and Henry Meiggs, the American railroad baron who financed it. Javier Perez de Cuellar, the fifth Secretary-General of the United Nations, is buried here as well. The sportsman Alejandro Villanueva, a legendary footballer from Alianza Lima, also rests within these walls.

The cemetery's most imposing structure is the Cripta de los Heroes, a marble-and-stone mausoleum erected to honor those who fell in the War of the Pacific, the devastating 1879-1884 conflict between Peru and Chile. Created by law in 1906 and inaugurated on September 8, 1908, during the presidency of Jose Pardo y Barreda, the crypt was designed by architect Emile Robert in an eclectic style crowned with a marble reproduction of Antonin Mercie's Gloria Victis. Inside, the main floor holds the sarcophagi of Admiral Miguel Grau, who died at the Battle of Angamos on October 8, 1879, and Colonel Francisco Bolognesi, who fell defending Arica on June 7, 1880. Across three levels, the crypt contains 295 identified remains in sarcophagi and niches, plus 2,065 wall plaques bearing the names of combatants and unidentified victims. A second basement was added in 1986, its white marble niches set against black marble walls. The inscription at the entrance reads: "La Nacion a sus Defensores en la Guerra de 1879" -- The Nation, to its Defenders in the War of 1879.