Universidad nacional de Colombia

This guide to Universidad Nacional de Colombia traces the campus back to a single notarial deed signed on September 20, 1937, and to the roughly fifteen hundred hectares of open savanna west of the old city left behind by a lawyer named José Joaquín Vargas, who died childless in 1936 after willing his fortune away. You'll hear how the young Colombian government, trying to gather a scattered university founded in 1867 under one roof, worked out an unusual arrangement for the land, designed by architect Leopoldo Rother. Classes began here on August 5, 1938, Bogotá's four-hundredth birthday.