Iglesia de San Francisco
Colonial church with a gilded seventeenth-century altarpiece, rebuilt twice after earthquakes cracked its tower and facade.
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About this audio guide
This guide to Iglesia de San Francisco in Bogotá starts with an eviction: in eighteen sixty-one, president Tomas Cipriano de Mosquera signed a decree stripping the friars of the monastery they'd prayed in for three centuries. You'll hear how the church had already survived two earthquakes that cracked its tower and tore down its facade, and about the golden altarpiece, gilded by sixteen twenty-three and paid for by a merchant named Lorenzo Hernandez, that outlasted all of it. Look up at the apostles and saints layered in gold leaf, carved and gilded before the republic that later confiscated this building even existed.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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