How Bogota Was Built and Evolved Over Time

Bogota is built in brick, and that is more distinctive than it sounds.

Colonial core

La Candelaria preserves the Spanish grid and single-storey houses of adobe and rammed earth under barrel-tiled roofs, built around internal courtyards with barred windows and heavy doors onto the street. They are painted in strong colours — a twentieth-century habit rather than a colonial one — and the hillside setting means the streets step.

The republican period

The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought neoclassical public buildings, the capitol on the main square, and English-influenced brick villas in Teusaquillo.

Brick modernism

The city’s distinctive contribution. With no local stone and abundant good clay from the old lake bed, Bogota built its modern architecture in fired brick rather than concrete or glass. Rogelio Salmona is the figure: his Torres del Parque of 1970, three curved brick towers beside the bullring, and later the Virgilio Barco library, use brick in curves, ramps, water and courtyards in a way that is unmistakably of this place. Whole districts of red brick towers follow the idea, if not always the quality.

Earthquake rules

Soft lake clays amplify shaking, so height has been constrained and the code is strict.

What 1948 destroyed

The riots after Gaitan’s assassination burned out much of the commercial centre, and the rebuilding that followed drove a wide modern avenue through the old grid and replaced blocks of colonial building with mid-century offices. It is why La Candelaria survives as a fragment rather than as the whole historic city, and why the centre changes character so abruptly a few streets north of the main square.

Informal growth

Much of the south and west was self-built and later regularised and connected.