National Capitol

This guide to Bogotá's National Capitol starts on the ground it stands on, once the viceroy's palace, the Royal Audiencia court, and the colonial jail, before fire and a certain borrowed flowerpot changed what this corner meant. You'll hear how General Tomas Cipriano de Mosquera, an admirer of the British parliament, pushed for a stone legislature and hired Danish architect Thomas Reed to design it. Construction began in eighteen forty-eight and dragged through civil wars and seven different architects, long enough that bogotanos gave the unfinished shell its own nickname.