Pele’s corpse will be buried on the 9th floor of the Memorial Necrópole Ecumênica cemetery in Santos, left
Pele’s funeral rites started today, Monday, 2 January 2023 with his body moved from the Albert Einstein Hospital to be put in the stadium. Before his death, Pele asked to be buried in a skyscraper cemetery, called Memorial Necrópole Ecumênica.
The wake at Vila Belmiro will continue tomorrow, Tuesday, at 10 a.m. local time (8 a.m. ET), then Pelé’s coffin will, as CNN reported, be carried through the streets of the city of Santos, “including the street where Pelé’s 100-year-old mother, Celeste Arantes, lives.”
Pele’s corpse will be moved to the Memorial Necrópole Ecumênica cemetery in Santos, “where a private funeral, reserved for family members, will be held” on Tuesday, 3 January.
Pele will be buried at the Memorial Necrópole Ecumênica on Tuesday
In a post, “Pele’s Final Rest House,” Sola Fanawopo, wrote that back in 2003, Pele expressed his desire for his remains to rest at the Memorial Necropole Ecumenica cemetery, one which is located less than a kilometre away from Santos’ Vila Belmiro stadium.
The private ceremony will be attended by just Pele’s family and his remains will occupy the ninth floor of a vertical cemetery as a tribute to his father, who wore no.9 during his professional career as a footballer.”
The Memorial Necrópole Ecumênica is a Brazilian cemetery. Located in Santos, in the state of São Paulo, its construction, according to the article, “The World’s Tallest Cemetery”, published in Atlas Obscura on 14 September 2021, started in 1983 and the first burial was on 28 July 1984.
As contained in the article, “Closer to heaven: Brazil’s high rise cemetery” published in Hindustan Times on 18 November 2010, the cemetery is 32 stories high and occupies a total of 1.8 hectares of land and contains about 16,000 graves.
It received the Guinness World Records title for the tallest cemetery in the world.