Bonaventure Cemetery Golf Cart Tour

The 160-acre Victorian necropolis sits on a bluff above the Wilmington River, three miles east of Savannah's historic district, and its name derives from the Italian buona ventura — good fortune — a term applied to the original estate by its 18th-century owners. By the 1860s, Bonaventure had become Savannah's most fashionable burial ground, with families commissioning marble statuary from Italian workshops and planting azaleas, camellias, and wisteria along the serpentine carriage paths.

John Muir slept here for several nights in 1867, spreading his blanket among the tombs during his thousand-mile walk to the Gulf. The bird-girl statue that graced the cover of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil stood here from 1938 until 1994, when it was moved to the Telfair Museum to prevent theft.

Today the grounds hold more than 19,000 marked graves, including the plots of lyricist Johnny Mercer, Supreme Court Justice James Moore Wayne, and Conrad Aiken, whose bench-style monument faces the marsh where he spent childhood afternoons. A Bonaventure cemetery golf cart tour covers approximately three miles of the cemetery's paved roads in 60 to 90 minutes, pausing at sculptural highlights like the Gaston family plot with its life-sized bronze angel and the Aiken grave's stone seat inscribed with the poet's epitaph. Live oak canopy blocks much of the midday sun, but summer heat and humidity make motorized transport practical for visitors who prefer not to walk the full circuit. Guides narrate the stories behind the cemetery's most elaborate monuments and explain the symbolism embedded in Victorian funerary art — inverted torches for extinguished life, draped urns for mourning, ivy for fidelity.

The cemetery remains an active burial ground managed by the City of Savannah. New interments occur weekly in the modern sections toward the property's eastern edge, while the historic western quadrants preserve the 19th-century landscape largely unchanged. Guided golf cart tours operate year-round and accommodate visitors with mobility limitations who would find the uneven brick paths and extended distances difficult on foot.