Bogotá stacks four histories on one Andean plateau: Muisca chiefdoms, a Spanish viceregal capital, the 1810 revolt and a violent republic. These three days follow that order, from clay funerary urns to Bolívar's escape window.
A 17th-century nobleman's mansion holding some 30,000 pre-Columbian ceramics from Muisca, Quimbaya, Tairona and Calima potters. Original ochre arcades and stone patio survive intact. Open Tue–Sat 08:30–17:00, Sun 09:00–16:00.
Built 1629–1647 for the Poor Clares, this single-nave church keeps 148 paintings and gilded polychrome saints across its barrel vault — the densest surviving colonial interior in Colombia. Now a state museum, Tue–Fri 09:00–17:00.
Set in the 1604 Jesuit Colegio Máximo, the oldest civil building still standing in the city, with 250 years of viceregal art — including the world's largest collection of Gregorio Vásquez de Arce y Ceballos canvases. Tue–Sun 09:00–17:00.
The oldest surviving church in Bogotá, begun by Franciscans in 1557 and finished in 1621. Its Mudéjar-influenced main altarpiece is carved and gilded in one continuous wall of wood. Free entry, open daily until roughly 19:45.
Founded in 1823, the country's oldest museum occupies the Panóptico, a Greek-cross penitentiary built in 1874 and used as a prison until 1946. Former cells now hold goldwork, Bolívar's relics and rooms on the armed conflict. Tue–Sun 09:00–17:00.
On 20 July 1810 a staged quarrel over a borrowed flower vase in this corner shop triggered the revolt against Spanish rule. Nine rooms display the vase fragments, the Acta de Independencia and papers of the first junta. Entry around COP 4.000.
Simón Bolívar's country house from 1820 to 1830, granted by the young republic at the foot of the eastern hills. Original furnishings, campaign trunk and the garden window through which Manuela Sáenz helped him flee the 1828 assassination attempt.
The national theatre of 1892, raised for the fourth centenary of Columbus's crossing, with an Italianate horseshoe of tiers, an Annibale Cabrera ceiling and roughly 900 seats under a chandelier of Murano glass. Calle 10 #5-32.
Home of Juan de Sámano, the last Spanish viceroy, who fled the city in 1819 after the defeat at Boyacá. It is now the municipal museum, with maps tracing the settlement of 1538 into a metropolis of 8 million. Tue–Sun 09:00–17:00.
A hillside parish laid out in the 1550s around the Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de Egipto, notorious as a no-go zone in the 1990s. Former gang members now guide the route past the church and the ground where the Reyes Magos festival is staged each January.
Opened in 1836 as the city's first public burial ground, holding presidents, Luis Carlos Galán and rows of German-influenced neoclassical mausoleums. Locals still queue at Leo Kopp's statue to whisper requests into the bronze ear.
A Muisca settlement, then a separate colonial town that Bogotá only absorbed in 1954. The stone church of Santa Bárbara, consecrated in 1665, still faces a cobbled plaza ringed by low whitewashed houses with clay-tile roofs.