The Presbítero Matías Maestro Cemetery Museum is in Barrios Altos, in central Lima, at Jirón Áncash 1692. The Lima Beneficence Society, which administers the site, dates its opening to May 31, 1808. It was designed by the priest Matías Maestro Alegría as the General Cemetery of Lima, at a time when public-health concerns were prompting burials to move away from churches. The institution says the cemetery adopted Maestro’s name in 1923, was declared a Historic Monument in 1972 and became a museum on June 9, 1999. Its layered identity is central to the visit: it remains a burial ground as well as a place to encounter the city’s history and art.
The official tourism inventory describes a landscape of more than 700 mausoleums and records 22 hectares, while the Beneficence’s current visitor page describes more than 20 hectares. The difference reflects the way the two official descriptions round the area; both convey a large historic enclosure rather than a compact indoor museum. The inventory connects the growth of funerary monuments to an 1847 authorization to build mausoleums and to Peru’s economic prosperity during the guano and saltpetre era. Families used architecture and sculpture to express remembrance and social standing. Walking the avenues, visitors see how burial customs, artistic taste and public memory have changed over generations.
