Plaza de Bolívar

This guide to Plaza de Bolívar in Bogotá opens with the golden-man legend that first drew Spanish colonizers to these highlands, then turns to the morning of July 20, 1810, when creole notables asked a Spanish merchant to lend them a vase for a dinner, expecting him to refuse. It follows how that refusal spread through the market crowd and reached the viceroy by nightfall. A small museum on the plaza's corner still holds the vase's cracked porcelain base.