Pelé to be laid to rest in replica stadium in world’s tallest cemetery

Pelé was a footballer like no other, and his final resting place will be exceptional too: a large replica stadium complete with artificial turf inside the world’s tallest vertical cemetery.

The Brazilian football great, whose funeral was held Tuesday, bought his mausoleum 19 years ago inside the Memorial Ecumenical Cemetery, a high-rise building that holds the Guinness world record as the tallest cemetery in the world.

Located in Santos, the south-eastern port city where “The King” played for most of his storied career, the cemetery has a total area of 40,000 sq meters (430,000 sq feet) and features a 24-hour restaurant, a chapel, an automobile museum, a small fish pond and an aviary.

The entrance to the mausoleum where the coffin of the late Brazilian football star Pelé will rest at the Santos’ Memorial Cemetery in Santos. Photograph: Miguel Schincariol/AFP/Getty Images

Edson Arantes do Nascimento – Pelé’s real name – had spoken openly about his planned resting place, saying in 2003 that he liked the spot because it “doesn’t look like a cemetery” and that it gave him a feeling of “spiritual peace and tranquility.”

Located on the first floor, Pelé’s 200-square-meter mausoleum will be decorated like a football stadium, with his embalmed body resting in a coffin displayed in the middle of the artificial turf, surrounded by gilded images from his glory days, a spokesperson for the cemetery said.

The striking white building was conceived by late Argentine businessman Jose Salomon Altstut, who broke ground on the project in 1983.

A view of the Memorial Necropole Ecumenica where the Brazilian football legend Pelé is to be buried. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Officially inaugurated in 1991, it has 18,000 interment spaces, and became the first vertical cemetery in the world to provide space for mausoleums.

The cemetery’s website says clients are allowed to “create a decorated space” in their mausoleums, which can even include en suite rest areas for mourners.

Pelé’s late father, aunt, brother and daughter are already interred in the same place, as well as Antonio Wilson Honorio, nicknamed “Coutinho,” his teammate at Santos FC in the 1960s.

The cemetery sits a stone’s throw from Santos’s Vila Belmiro stadium, where Pelé first dazzled the world as a 15-year-old phenomenon, on his way to scoring a record 1,281 career goals and becoming the only player in history to win three World Cups.