Plaza Bolívar, NW corner. Now turn round… …and you see this: the low building clearly a survival from the colonial era. Plaza Bolívar, SW corner. Now turn round… …and there is another colonial-era survival occupying that corner. (And this works at the NE corner too.) We now follow the street into which the taxi is headed… …and… …after one block we reach the church of Santa Clara, completed in 1647. Santa Clara was built to serve a convent of Poor Clares. It is now a museum, with each and every bit of the decoration explained on panels running along the walls, some even interactive. (The cable drums are part of a temporary art project.) The stone slab sealing the burial vault underneath the chancel bears an inscription with the date 1647. Calle 10 with the Jesuit Church Calle 10 The larger 17th-c. mansions like this one in Calle 11 all had patios like this. Catedral: wall of the nave running along Calle 11. Supposedly the old cathedral was demolished in 1806 (4 years before independence was declared in 1810) and the new one built 1807-1824. But the crowned (!) coat of arms above this door and the blocked windows would seem to suggest that parts of the previous building were in fact reused. San Agustín. I wasn‘t sure we needed to go out of our way to see yet another templo colonial but I‘m glad we did.It’s nice to see the „secondary“ cast named too. Claustro de San Agustín. The church of S. Agustín had adjacent conventual buildings sadly demolished in 1940 to make way for some ministry. This 18th-c. cloister does not abut the church but is situated at a short distance. It is now used as a freely accessible exhibition space. The current exhibition was about victims of the guerilla wars in Colombia in the recent past.
