Church of the Veracruz

This guide to the Church of the Veracruz in Bogota follows the confraternity of merchants who once walked condemned prisoners through these doors, praying before one carved Christ on their last night and another on the morning of the execution. It traces how that centuries-old ritual, built for ordinary criminals, was called on between June and November 1816 to bury roughly eighty executed independence leaders beneath the church floor. The church's own account books recorded three pesos paid to the laborers who carried and buried them.