Many things have been said about Bogotá, many stories have been told and, as happens with big cities, these stories appear and are discovered just by going out into the street with some curiosity. Bogotá is an immense city, which was built like a sneeze, a little here, a little there, and the world is in its streets, not because it is a cosmopolitan metropolis, but because its streets have the names of cities and countries, names that go into the background because people are located by numbers and not by names.
—Please, take me along Alberto Lleras Avenue to Pepe Sierra Avenue, please.
—Where to? asks the taxi driver and asks me to get off, that I don’t know where I’m going, that the streets don’t have names in Bogotá.
But they do have them and in the historic center there are plaques that prove it: Dog Face, El Cajoncito, Las Culebras, El Pecado Mortal, Patio de las Brujas, Divorce, Love, Hope, Pleasure, Joy. and of Peace and Fatigue, of Sorrows, of Eagerness and of Agony. And there are more names, but not much space.
In addition to names, the streets are also adorned with holes, puddles and loose cobblestones that spark water and mud when stepped on. There is also rubbish and people who sleep on the street and people who sleep in old houses and mansions, as well as in skyscrapers from which you can see a good part of the city, because it is so big that from few places you can have a panoramic view of all Bacatá, because that was its original name.
When Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada arrived with his entourage from Spain and after a war and the death of indigenous and Spanish, on August 6, 1538 Fray Domingo de las Casas celebrated the first mass in a small chapel surrounded by 12 straw houses and wood, which the natives built. Then it was called Santa Fe de Bacatá, from Bogotá. Santa Fe, to honor the town where Jiménez de Quesada was originally from, Santa Fe de Granada.
The conquest advanced and when the colonization process was consolidated, Santa Fe became the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Granada, the center of power, the center in which power changed hands, hands that seem to be still there, ruling in the shadows. the destinations of an entire country. With the independence and the construction of the nation, the city witnessed the tireless wars that were constant during the 19th century and that led, at the edge of both the 19th and 20th centuries, to the city growing due to migrations. internal product of the multiple violences that have always subjected these lands.
With the turn of the century, the city and its ruling oligarchies were adapting it to their tastes and with references to the architecture of the European cities they visited to remove a little, perhaps, the stain of being American and not European, as they intended. Even so, they brought different influences from abroad that can still be found walking through the streets of Bogota. Neoclassical and republican buildings that share space with colonial houses and later with large French-style houses and others inspired by English architecture, later art deco and art Nouveau would arrive, which would later displace the influence of Le Corbusier – who visited Bogotá in the first half of the 21st century–, after the Second World War, brutalism would arrive and then the architecture of Salmona and finally contemporary architecture.
Today Bogotá is an immense monster in which each corner tells a story and the story of its past, a past shared by all of us who were either born in it or came to it without really knowing why, but which welcomes everyone, despite the aggressiveness of its traffic and its mass transportation system and its insecurity.
With this in mind, from Infobae Colombia we seek to understand the capital a little better and for this we will try -because we can only commit ourselves to that- to put together a cartography of the city, in which its past and its present meet and help us to understand what it is like to live in Bogotá.
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