Alto de São João Cemetery

The Alto de São João Cemetery was created in the Summer of 1833, following a cholera epidemic, together with the Prazeres Cemetery. Placed at the edge of the Estrada Militar da Circunvalação, in a gentle slope over the Chelas valley, its initial plan accounted for 3,366 graves. The burial ground presents a model similar to the Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, with the funeral chapel in the centre and the plots distributed along an orthogonal grid. The Republican Party chose this graveyard to inter its heroes, including Cândido dos Reis, Miguel Bombarda, and Elias Garcia. This cemetery also keeps the tombs of the precursors of the feminist and pacifist movements, as is the case of Ana de Castro Osório, Adelaide Cabete, Angelina Vidal, and Maria Veleda. The first crematorium in Portugal was built here in 1925, deactivated eleven years later during the Estado Novo, and reactivated in 1985. Since then, the cemetery has expanded to the south and to the west, limiting the city’s expansion, much like the Prazeres Cemetery.