Cemetery Tourism
This site is a celebration of cemeteries...and a guide to their visitation!!
Cemeteries are a viable object of and growing category of niche tourism, i.e., a type of attraction that can draw tourists on the merits of its culture and historial value, or cultural heritage. I think you will see in these pages that each cemetery is unique.
In addition to niche tourism, cemetery tourism falls under the category of “dark tourism”—which is generally defined as tourism to places associated with death and disaster.
There is historical precedent of cemeteries as tourist destinations, and increasingly so. As older cemeteries run out of burial space, some of them are reinventing themselves as travel and tourism destinations. For example, Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, conducts walking tours by local historians. Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, supposedly one of America’s most beautiful “park spaces,” not only draws tourists to the gravesites of numerous famous people buried there such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Henry Cabot Lodge, but visitors also come to see its horticultural variety and bird population. Perhaps the best-known example of cemetery tourism is the eternal flame at JFK’s burial site in Arlington Cemetery. Paris’ busy Père-Lachaise is the finally resting place of such divergent musical talents as Frederic Chopin and rock star Jim Morrison, who draws a heavy crowd of tourists.
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Site redesigned December 25, 2010