Parish of Our Lady of the Waters
Colonial-era convent church whose cloister spent decades as a smallpox and war hospital before its friars were evicted.
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About this audio guide
This guide to the Parish of Our Lady of the Waters in Bogotá starts with Dominican friars settling beside streams tumbling off the eastern hills in 1665, and follows the cloister through an 1802 smallpox epidemic that turned it into a fever ward. In 1861, Colombia's Liberal government declared every convent in the country extinct and forced the friars out. Soldiers wounded in the civil wars of the 1850s and 1860s were later carried through the same doors.
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