JAC
This building, across from Plaza Bolívar, is on a lot where the old cemetery of the Cathedral used to be. It was built by order of the City Council in 1673, and would later be an ecclesiastical prison during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1872 it stopped working as a cemetery because the General South Cemetery had been created by a Guzmán Blanco decree, so burials in the old city cemeteries, including churches and chapels, were forbidden. The completion of the building as it is now –a small rectangular building, arranged around a colonial courtyard surrounded by covered corridors– was ordered by Bishop Crispulo Uzcategui in 1884, as the seat for the Episcopal College. Made of austere materials, like stone, bricks and mud, inside it has an ossuary and twelve sealed crypts, which are believed to hold the remains of the city’s first bishops. In 1981 it was declared a National Historic Monument and later restored by architect Ramón Paolini. Since 1993 it functions as the Sacred Museum of Caracas, and exhibits religious colonial art, as well as metalwork pieces and liturgical ornaments.
DDN
DF-06