11 most beautiful cemeteries in the world

In her book Cities of the Dead: The World’s Most Beautiful Cemeteries, taphophile Yolanda Zappaterra presents a guide to some 50 burial sites around the world.

From Japan and Australia to Ireland and Senegal, she delves into wide-ranging rituals, fashions and customs around death and burial to present an absorbing picture of the after world. Here is a small selection of her favourites from the book.

A complex cultural mix of nomadic Central Asian, Islamic and Soviet makes the many cemeteries around the Issyk-Kul lake region of Kyrgyzstan as unique as they are arresting – so much so that one of them, Sary-Kamysh, was voted one of the most beautiful cemeteries in the world by National Geographic.

Spindly wire-frame yurt skeletons, brick-built monuments that look like mini-mosques, decorated towers and even onion-domed mausoleums styled on Russian churches offer a fascinating illustration of the region’s mix and heritage.

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Sitting like a surreal mirage on the Senegalese coastline some 100km south of Dakar lies what must surely be the noisiest cemetery in the world.

Respectful silence is impossible as your feet crunch over the ton upon ton of broken clam shells that make up the pretty island of Fadiouth, a traditional estuary fishing village linked to its cemetery via a wooden bridge.

The cemetery is notable for being used by both the predominant Christian population but also a significant Islamic population, including the first missionary who died in Senegal.

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Modern-day cemeteries often focus on the functional, but a visionary town council and architect will sometimes create a cemetery that’s uniquely expressive, as they have here on the outskirts of one of Italy’s most important medieval towns.

Influences from the town, such as narrow streets, tall medieval buildings and the famous Palazzo dei Consoli, have led to courtyards connected by monumental blocks and corridors which their architect Dragoni describes as “squares of silence, offering the public an opportunity to pause and reflect”.

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Perched high on the Bronte cliffs, the 50,000 or so graves looking out over the deep blue waters of the Pacific Ocean’s Tasman Sea are surely set in one of the most beautiful spots imaginable for an afterlife.

But it’s not just the location that makes Waverley so appealing; the romantic flourishes of 19th-century European cemeteries were instrumental in the design, and the mini Gothic chapels, weeping angels, beatific cherubs, classical columns and mournful figures of death, most created of white marble and cream limestone, create a beautiful aesthetic too.

Over time, all cemeteries form symbiotic relationships between the manmade and natural worlds. But Skogskyrkogården was established with that symbiosis at the core of its being, with the concept and experience of mourning and healing at its heart.

Set amid some 10,000 soaring pines, diminutive graves that are all less than waist height (even Greta Garbo’s, whose simple stone is carved with just her signature) make Skogskyrkogården an intensely spiritual experience. And on All Saints Day, when families bring candles and lanterns, that experience is nothing short of magical.

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When the barrister George Frederick Carden visited Paris’s Père Lachaise in Paris in 1821, he determined to come back to London and set up a similar cemetery. Twelve years later Kensal Green, the first of London’s Magnificent Seven garden-style cemeteries, opened to huge acclaim, with London society in thrall to the Arcadian idyll.

Two centuries on, that classical idyll and the thousands of Gothic graves and mausoleums make for an irresistible combination, as seen in the 1973 British horror movie Theatre of Blood. It’s a fine place to go celebrity grave hunting too, but you’ll search in vain for the tombs of Ingrid Bergman, Freddie Mercury or Joe Strummer. While all were cremated here, none, as many people believe, are buried here.

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Most cemeteries are sombre spaces, but the Merry Cemetery is just what its name suggests, with colourful folk art scenes painted onto over 800 bright blue wooden crosses, all bearing unique illustrated stories and poems about the deceased.

They are the work of two local craftsmen, Stan Ioan Pătraş, who carved them from the 1930s until his death in 1977, and his apprentice Dumitru Pop, who is still creating them today. Families give them free reign on how the life of the deceased is represented, though what the angel in red underpants represents is anyone’s guess!

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The abundance of life across this most fecund of cemeteries is almost an affront to the dead contained within it – lush greenery and vibrant colours are everywhere you look, from roses and spring azaleas in dazzling colours to live oaks thought to date back 250 years.

Bright green moss wraps tree trunks in a soft jewel-like down while silvery grey-white Spanish moss hangs down from branches like so many dense cobwebs to create a wonderfully gothic canopy over the graves below. As if responding to all this excess, the funerary art and sculpture here is some of the most beautiful in the country.

Père Lachaise is the archetypal Victorian garden cemetery, and with such celebrities as Jim Morrison, Édith Piaf, Oscar Wilde, Proust, Modigliani, Chopin and Maria Callas buried here, it’s no wonder it’s the most visited cemetery in the world (three million people visit each year).

Thanks to scale – 97 sections spread across 106 acres – it never feels crowded. Wandering among the tombs of the million or so bodies believed to have been buried here since it opened in 1804 (not including at least the same number of remains in the columbarium and the Aux Morts ossuary), exploring the wonderful array of funerary styles across the site, is an absolute pleasure.