Spread over a hillside in this south-central Guatemalan town, the vibrant colors used on the painted crosses, headstones, and mausoleums are a symbolic celebration: turquoise representing mothers, yellow standing for grandfathers. The town is also recognized for its use of color within Guatemala’s largest craft market, which specializes in handmade textiles. The majority of people buried here are of indigenous origins, and their Mayan descendants today still visit to honor their ancestors.

Known also as the City of Ghosts, this enormous cemetery, the largest in Vietnam and located in the former fishing village of Hue, is often empty of visitors. Lavish, towering mausoleums, most constructed with the Vietnamese diaspora’s earnings when emigrants sent money back to family members after reunification in 1975, include mosaic dragons and sculpted phoenixes, as well as rooms for the dearly departed to dwell in, and a range of tributes from Buddhist to Tao to Islamic.

One of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in the world, with the first graves dating from 1439 and the latest from 1787, the Old Jewish Cemetery is not far from the city’s Old Town Square. Characterized by an austere beauty, the site has locations where up to twelve layers of bodies exist (Jewish law prohibits destroying graves or removing the dead). The graveyard contains a mixture of simple, crooked tombstones and some more lavish ones reflective of the 16th century Renaissance in Prague.

Generals, governors, actors, writers, and singers are all preserved in this cemetery, where burial rights can still be purchased. Located on a bluff over the Wilmington River, east of Savannah, the cemetery gained fame in the 1994 novel by John Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. A walk among the venerable live oak trees past Spanish-American war veterans’ graves, those of Civil War soldiers, and those who perished in the wars of the 20th century, is serene in the early morning.

In Paris’ largest garden and the final resting place of hundreds of thousands including well-known artists and writers, scientists, and veterans, the names of the buried include Oscar Wilde, Frederic Chopin, Gertrude Stein, Amedeo Modigliani, and Jim Morrison. Père Lachaise is thought to be the most visited cemetery in the world, but it is the quiet tree-lined pathways and labyrinthic aisles away from the mapped celebrity graves where the quiet appeal lies.