San Francisco Palace

The San Francisco Palace is a neoclassical building designed by the French architect Gastón Lelarge in 1917. It is located between the Seventh and Eighth races, on Jiménez Environmental Axis Avenue in the town of Santa Fe in Bogotá. It is located, right next to the San Francisco Church, in front of the Henry Faux and Pedro A. López buildings and diagonally to the El Tiempo building, on the Seventh race. The building replaced the old cloister attached to the church of San Francisco. In its beginnings it housed the Governorate of Cundinamarca. It was declared a national monument in 1984. In 1557, Brother Juan de los Barrios, the first archbishop of Bogotá, moved his Franciscan brothers to some houses located in the western neighborhood of Las Nieves, next to the San Francisco River, where they built the church of San Francisco. On the grounds where the current palace was built was the 17th-century convent of the Purification of Our Lady, which included three claustrated courtyards and an orchard. It stretched between the Seventh and Eighth races, and Jiménez Avenue and Sixteenth Street.