Among the cemetery’s Gothic, Greek, Moorish, and Egyptian-style sepulchres, all but two of the country’s presidents are interred: Bernardo O’Higgins’s remains rest beneath Plaza Bulnes on the Alameda and Gabriel González Videla was buried in his native La Serena.

Other notable figures include diplomat Orlando Letelier (killed by a car bomb in Washington, D.C., by military intelligence agents under orders from Pinochet’s henchman General Manuel Contreras), Venezuelan-born scholar and educator Andrés Bello, and cultural icon folksinger and songwriter Violeta Parra.

Nobel Prize poets Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda were both interred here as well, but Mistral’s body was moved to her Elqui valley birthplace and Neruda’s to his Isla Negra coastal residence.

Salvador Allende moved in the other direction—after 17 years in Viña del Mar, following the end of the Pinochet dictatorship, he regained his freedom to travel to a monumental memorial here. Another indicator of change is sculptor Francisco Gazitúa’s Rostros (Faces), a memorial to the regime’s detained and executed victims.