José de San Martín died on 17 August 1850, in his house at Boulogne-sur-Mer, France. He requested in his will to be taken to the cemetery without any funeral, and to be moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, afterwards. He also bequeathed his curved saber to the Argentine governor Juan Manuel de Rosas. Mariano Balcarce informed Rosas and the foreign minister Felipe Arana of San Martín's death. Balcarce oversaw the embalming of his remains and his temporary stay in a chapel of the city. He also sent the saber to Buenos Aires. The remains of San Martín were finally repatriated on May 29, 1880, during the presidency of Nicolás Avellaneda. The mausoleum was placed inside the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Cathedral. As San Martín was suspected of being a freemason, the mausoleum was placed in an expanded wing of the Cathedral.

His legacy. San Martín was first acclaimed as a national hero of Argentina by the Federals, both during his late life and immediately after his death. The unitarians still resented his refusal to aid the Supreme Directors with the Army of the Andes and his constant support to Rosas. The unitarian Bartolomé Mitre wrote a biography of San Martín, "Historia de San Martín y de la emancipación sudamericana" (Spanish: History of San Martín and the South American

emancipation). There are statues of San Martín in most cities of Argentina,such as The Cerro de la Gloria, monument to the Army of the Andes at Mendoza (left), as well as in Santiago de Chile and Lima. José Gil de Castro made the first portrait of San Martín, and several other artists would made works about him along the years. The most important films featuring San Martín are the 1970 El Santo de la Espada and the 2010 Revolución: El cruce de los Andes.