Why Your Next Trip Itinerary Should Include a Cemetery

Earlier this year, Brooklyn’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery opened a $43 million visitor center, a soaring exhibition and event space in a restored Victorian glass-and-copper greenhouse. At the Green-House at Green-Wood, visitors to the 1838 cemetery—whose garden-like 478 acres were a model for Central Park—will find historical exhibits, a rotating slate of contemporary art shows, and maps pinpointing the graves of luminaries like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Leonard Bernstein. The center is also a jumping-off point for a packed calendar of activities that includes guided birding walks, “grieving and weaving” sessions, and tree-climbing workshops.

The investment is on a scale you might expect from a major museum or national park, and it puts Green-Wood at the forefront of a what’s-old-is-new trend: cemeteries expanding visitor offerings focused on nature, history, and culture. Faced with increasing maintenance costs and a declining demand for traditional burials, graveyards in the United States and Europe are positioning themselves as cultural gathering places, both to generate new revenue and to boost their civic relevance. Harnessing their dramatic architecture and abundant green space for activities aimed at the living, these cemeteries may soon become as familiar to tourists as more famous burial grounds like Père Lachaise in Paris and La Recoleta in Buenos Aires.

Cemeteries have a history as tourist attractions

Visiting a cemetery for recreation is not a new idea. “In the Victorian era, when death was very present, people would picnic and walk in cemeteries all the time,” says Sofia Gryzinski, a British-Brazilian multimedia artist who has staged interactive exhibits in London graveyards. “Then, for much of the 20th century, these places were abandoned and sometimes derelict. But now people are reclaiming them as public spaces.”

Don’t confuse the trend with dark tourism, which sees travelers visiting the sites of catastrophes like Chernobyl. “Most historic cemeteries aren’t trying to sensationalize things or lean into a Party City Halloween feel,” says Harry Weil, Green-Wood’s vice-president of education and public programs. “Our main responsibility is still to the people buried here and their families.”

Some programming focuses on the rituals of death and dying. The 1807 Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C., is one of several cemeteries that host regular “death cafes”—informal gatherings of strangers to discuss issues surrounding death and dying over tea and cake. Mount Auburn, a monument-filled 1831 burial ground near Boston, hosts cemetery symbolism walking tours that dig into the meaning of headstone motifs like cherubs, weeping willows, and urns.

But other graveyards are leaning into nature and the arts. Philadelphia’s 1840 Woodlands Cemetery features a volunteer program to create period-appropriate ornamental gardens as well as tours focused on subjects like horticulture and tracking animals that live on the grounds. Chamber music concerts take place throughout the year on the 285 rolling acres of Cleveland’s 1869 Lake View Cemetery & Arboretum and inside its Victorian chapel.

Burial grounds can be biodiversity hotspots

Much of the emerging programming focuses on cemeteries’ abundant flora and fauna. The garden cemeteries built in the 19th century were vast natural refuges from the Victorian era’s crowded and often squalid urban living conditions: the 1874 Vienna Central Cemetery covers 620 acres just outside the Austrian capital; Green-Wood is nearly the size of nearby Prospect Park, the largest green space in Brooklyn. “Before 1850, cemeteries took the place of public parks,” says Keith Eggener, a professor of architectural history at the University of Oregon and the author of the illustrated history Cemeteries. “They were sculpture gardens, botanical gardens, and places where you took out-of-town visitors to show them quiet spaces outside of the city.”

London is known for its Magnificent Seven, a ring of suburban graveyards, including the famed 1839 Highgate Cemetery, which were built to alleviate overcrowding of the dead—and the living—in the central city. “On our guided walks we try to not only talk about who is buried at Highgate Cemetery—Karl Marx, George Michael—but also about the creatures living here, like foxes, birds, and spiders,” says Ian Dungavell, the facility’s chief executive.

Many cemeteries are coming up with fresh ways to explore their old-growth trees and the creatures who live among them: Green-Wood hosts after-dark bat walks, while Vienna Central offers tours to see the critically endangered European hamsters who reside in the continent’s second-largest cemetery. A few have even begun introducing new animals, both for their ecological benefits and their appeal to tourists. The 1884 Evergreen-Washelli Cemetery, created by the founders of Seattle, hosts hives for the Catacomb Bee Collective as well as pollinating classes for kids. In addition to maintaining the graves of 22,000 souls, the 1806 Old City Cemetery in Lynchburg, Virginia, has a herd of working goats that lure young guests even as they keep the grass trimmed.

Things are happening among the tombs

For one night each summer at Green-Wood, fairy lights and torches illuminate a procession of fire-eaters, acrobats, and other circus performers outside the Gothic-style Niblo Mausoleum. This annual tribute to the 19th-century theater owner William Niblo epitomizes the trend of graveyards becoming full-fledged cultural centers, sometimes after hours.

“Cemeteries are experimenting with programming like performances, speakers, and art installations—often things you might not be able to do in other spaces,” Weil says. “In part it’s to engage younger generations, to try to get them interested in these historic properties.”

Some graveyards—like Los Angeles’ Hollywood Forever Cemetery—have events multiple times a week. The final resting spot of Judy Garland and Burt Reynolds regularly holds yoga classes on lawns or inside chapels and hosts concerts, lectures, and readings in a 1927 Masonic lodge on its grounds. In the summertime, the cemetery projects classic movies onto the side of a large mausoleum.

In London, Gryzinski’s White Sol Studio has created art installations at two of the Magnificent Seven. In early 2026, the artist helped visitors make string webs on the trees in Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park. “It was a statement about the interconnectedness among the living, the dead, and nature,” she says.

Are we respecting the sanctity of the deceased?

Some cemeteries, particularly those with many active burials or war graves, are wary of encouraging too much tombstone tourism.

“Does this undermine the dignity of these spaces?” Eggener asks. “I don’t know. But in earlier eras, these cemeteries did have to list activities that were prohibited, like carriage races and bird hunting.” In some burial grounds, especially in the U.K., anything that involves walking across graves is verboten.

For the new “Ancestra Lumina” program, an immersive multimedia stroll through Montréal’s 1854 Notre-Dame-des-Neiges Cemetery, the audiovisual installation company Moment Factory made sure to tread carefully. “There are a million people buried here on Mont-Royal, and we wanted to develop something honoring their memories,” says Patricia Ruel, the company’s lead creative director. That meant no to illuminating specific graves, but yes to projecting the stories of famous and ordinary Montrealers onto the side of a mausoleum. “We also recorded people saying the names of their family members who are resting here,” Ruel says. “That became a really special part of the program.”

Many older graveyards in the U.S. have more relaxed policies: Congressional’s summer movie nights allow seating among the headstones; Mount Auburn’s watercolor classes encourage students to set up easels wherever they like.

“I think society is moving back towards making cemeteries a part of everyday life,” says Laura Lyster-Mensh, a death doula who facilitates events at Washington, D.C.’s Congressional Cemetery. “We’re supposed to be among our ancestors. We aren’t just supposed to stash them in a churchyard and move on.”