Museo Colonial
Jesuit cloister that once cradled Colombia's National Museum, now hung with colonial religious art.
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About this audio guide
This guide to Museo Colonial in Bogotá follows the seventeenth-century cloister called Casa de las Aulas through several unlikely lives: a Jesuit college, a royal library, a barracks, and even the hall where Antonio Nariño was sworn in as president in 1812. It traces how the building became home to Colombia's National Museum in 1845, and how the museum's own founding collection grew out of the Royal Botanical Expedition led by Jose Celestino Mutis decades earlier. Along the way you'll hear about the workshop of local artists who spent twenty years painting specimens no European had classified. Look up at the colonial portraits by Gregorio Vasquez de Arce y Ceballos as you walk the same rooms.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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