Chapinero

This guide to Chapinero in Bogotá traces the neighborhood's name back to a nineteenth-century cobbler who made sturdy wooden-soled shoes for people slogging through its once-muddy streets, and then turns to the Gothic-revival church that rose above them starting in 1875 under architect Julián Lombana. You'll hear how local builders who had likely never set foot in a European cathedral copied its ribbed vaults from scratch, and how the colored glass came shipped in from Germany. The guide follows the twenty-one-year build and the compromises the design had to make along the way.