Tango legend Carlos Gardel's posthumous journey home

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On Wednesday, tango fans mark the 80th anniversary of Carlos Gardel's death. Legends surround both the beginning and end of the Argentine singer's life, with many fans disagreeing not just on where he was born but also on what caused the aeroplane crash that killed him.

Less known are the details of the long journey his body went on after his death, as BBC Mundo's Natalio Cosoy reports from Colombia.

It all started on 18 December 1935, barely six months after his death in an aeroplane crash in the Colombian city of Medellin.

Gardel had been temporarily interred in Medellin, pending the bureaucratic paperwork needed to repatriate his body to Argentina.

Local papers recorded the moment Carlos Gardel's remains began their journey to their final resting place in the Argentine capital, Buenos Aires.

"At six in the afternoon the body of Carlos Gardel was exhumed," wrote daily El Tiempo.

"The body will be embalmed tonight so it can be sent to [the Colombian port city of] Buenaventura on the first train," the article explained.

El Heraldo described the ornate metal coffin the body of "the unfortunate artist" had been placed in and informed its readers that it would take a month to reach the late singer's home city of Buenos Aires.

In the end, it took almost double that, and it was not just a train journey that the remains of the tango singer would embark on.

Horse power

From Medellin they were were taken by train to the small town of La Pintada, where the body and the tango great's belongings were transferred to a caravan of small buses.

Twenty-five kilometres (15 miles) to the south, in the Colombian town of Valparaiso, the road ended.

So the coffin, twenty trunks of Gardel's belongings and three cases filled with his hats were loaded on to mules and horses to cross this particularly mountainous part of Colombia, academic Jaime Rico Salazar recounts in an article.

Luis Gomez, who accompanied the body on behalf of the transport company Expreso Ribon, recalled how the caravan came to another halt a further 40km to the south.

"Officials and residents in this friendly town requested we stop in Supia so that they could pay their respects to the remains of Carlos Gardel, which I am taking to Buenos Aires," he wrote in the daily El Colombiano on 21 December 1935.

Free passage

From Supia, the body was taken in a small bus to the city of Pereira, where it was loaded on to a train to the port city of Buenaventura,

Gardel expert Luciano Londono Lopez says that the local railway company waived its fee as a mark of respect for the late tango singer.

On 29 December 1935, the body arrived in Buenaventura, on Colombia's Pacific coast.

Here, it was loaded on to the steamship Santa Monica, which sailed to Panama.

In Panama, it was loaded on to another steamer, the Santa Rita, sailing all the way to New York.

The body arrived in New York 20 days after it had been exhumed in Medellin.

The coffin was placed on view for several days in a New York funerary home before embarking on the final leg of its journey.

On 17 January 1936, it sailed on another steamship to Buenos Aires, where it arrived on 5 February after stops in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and the Uruguayan capital, Montevideo.

Crowds gather

The New York Times reported on its arrival in the Argentine capital.

"A crowd estimated at 20,000 stood bareheaded at the docks when the SS Pan America arrived this morning with Gardel's coffin," the paper wrote.

Describing the drama of the arrival, the author said: "Many women and girls fainted and were trampled by the crowd, and mounted police finally had to charge to prevent those behind from pushing those in front into the river."

Local newspaper El Litoral put the figure of those waiting for Gardel's arrival at 40,000, double that of the New York Times.

"The hearse was simple in style, pulled by six horses, and followed by a second hearse carrying all the flowers," El Litoral wrote.

The funeral procession proceeded to Luna Park, which the New York Times described as "the largest covered stadium in South America".

El Litoral described how fans starting singing the crooner's most famous songs as the funeral procession filed past.

In Luna Park, the body lay overnight before being carried on foot to Chacarita cemetery where it was laid to rest in the Artists' Pantheon.

But not even here would its long journey end.

Almost a year after it was interred in the pantheon, officials decided to move Gardel's body to a larger plot, writes Simon Collier in his book The Life, Music, and Times of Carlos Gardel.

So his remains were once more exhumed and moved to what has become its final resting place in a mausoleum with his statue on 7 November 1937.