Santuario Nuestra Señora del Carmen
Striped Gothic sanctuary crowdfunded by public bazaars, its colonial chapel reborn as a theater.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Santuario Nuestra Señora del Carmen in Bogotá opens in 1934, when Bogotá began tearing down a two-hundred-year-old Carmelite convent on this corner to build something grander for the city's anniversary, and a crowd gathered to stop the demolition. You'll hear how Salesian priests with no budget turned to bazaars, raffles and a plea to Congress, and how the architect Giovanni Buscaglione, an Italian Salesian brother who had studied churches from Florence to Constantinople, stretched every peso with cheap materials rather than carved stone. Look for the bell tower's twisting columns, borrowed from Córdoba's mosque and Sienese cathedrals.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Iglesia Nuestra Señora de las Nieves
Romanesque-Byzantine church rebuilt after 1917, its two bell towers deliberately mismatched.
Chapinero
Gothic-revival basilica with twin towers, ribbed vaults and German stained glass, at the heart of a former shoemakers' district.
Iglesia de San Francisco
Colonial church with a gilded seventeenth-century altarpiece, rebuilt twice after earthquakes cracked its tower and facade.
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.
Iglesia de la Concepcion
Colonial convent church with a gilded mudejar ceiling salvaged from a flood-wrecked mansion.
Saint Ignatius of Loyola Church
Baroque Jesuit church seized by the crown, renamed for a king, and held by strangers for over a century.