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The National Museum of Colombia (Spanish: Museo Nacional de Colombia) is the National Museum of Colombia housing collections on its history, art, culture. Located in the Santa Fe locality of Bogotá, Colombia, it is the largest and oldest museum in Colombia. The National Museum of Colombia is a dependency of the Colombian Ministry of Culture.
The museum houses a collection of over 20,000 pieces including works of art and objects representing different national history periods. Permanent exhibitions present archeology and ethnography samples from Colombian artefacts dating 10,000 years BC, up to twentieth century indigenous and afro- Colombian art and culture. Founders and New Kingdom of Granada room houses Liberators and other Spanish iconography; the round room exhibits a series of oleos from Colombia painting history.
Established by an act of Congress on 28 July 1823, the National Museum of Colombia is the oldest museum in the country and one of the oldest in the Americas. The law also created a mining school and provided chairs for both institutions.
The founding staff came from a scientific mission assembled in Europe. In 1822, Simón Bolívar resolved to create a mining school at Bogotá and left recruitment to Francisco Antonio Zea, Gran Colombia's minister in Paris. Peruvian mineralogist Mariano Eduardo de Rivero y Ustáriz was invited to lead the group, which included French chemist Jean-Baptiste Boussingault and several other naturalists. A government decree of March 1824 named Rivero as director of the museum and school of mines.
On 15 October 2026, the Ministry of Culture, Arts and Knowledge removed a group of items from the museum's permanent exhibition, following an instruction from President Abelardo de la Espriella to remove from state public spaces items associated with members of armed groups. Media outlets initially reported the removal of around thirty items, including objects and documents related to LGBT and feminist movements, the political violence of the 1980s and 1990s, the 1991 Constitution, and the 2016 peace agreement.
In its response to a tutela action admitted by the 24th Family Court of Bogotá, the Ministry stated that the measure affected five of the museum's seventeen exhibition rooms (Memoria y Nación, Hacer Sociedad, Tierra como Recurso, Ser y Hacer, and Fuerza, Fe y Sustancia), and that the rooms were not closed. The inventory it submitted lists 63 objects, of which 22 are classified as heritage pieces, and states that they are being stored under technical conservation conditions.
Culture Minister Paola Holguín stated that the museum should not serve as an instrument of "political indoctrination" or a space for the glorification of crime, and that its exhibition rooms are being evaluated and redesigned. Opposition legislators, activist groups, and social media users criticized the removal, describing it as an attempt to erase part of the country's historical memory, while other sectors supported it. Among the arguments raised by critics was that the museum's institutional mission includes recognizing diverse narratives.
Designed by Danish architect Thomas Reed in 1850, but constructed in 1872, the Panóptico was Colombia's largest and most important prison until it was replaced by La Picota prison in 1946.
After the last prisoners were transferred to the new facilities, the Panóptico underwent two years of restoration and adapted for museum functions, but the inauguration, scheduled for April 9, 1948, had to be postponed due to the riots that occurred in the city following the assassination of the liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. On 2 May 1948, the building was opened to the public with "three national museums": on the first floor the "Archaeological and Ethnographic Museum", on the second the "Historical Museum" and, on the third, the "Museum of Fine Arts".
Between 1976 and 1977, the building was partially restored and the permanent exhibition rooms were restructured with educational criteria and a contemporary museographic design. The same process was followed in 1980 to accommodate the archaeology and ethnography collections.
Unlike other national museums, the National Museum of Colombia is not divided into different institutions that focus on particular collections. For that reason, the museum divides its collection into four main categories: Archeology, art, ethnography, and social history.
Around 10,000 pieces that began to be collected as "curiosities" in the 18th century, as "antiquities" in the 19th century and as a result of systematic research from the first decades of the 20th century, constitute the archaeological collection preserved by the Colombian Institute of Anthropology (ICAN) in the National Museum of Colombia.
When the National Museum was founded in 1823, "large bones of unknown animals" and "a mummy found near Tunja" were part of the collection. Later, during the second half of the 19th century, important studies began to be produced on the "antiquities of the Indians" and in this way objects from the Muisca, Quimbaya and San Agustín cultures were collected.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the first purely archaeological investigations took place, including the excavations carried out by Konrad Theodor Preuss in San Agustín (1913-1914), John Alden Mason in Pueblito and other Tairona areas (1922-1923), and Carlos Cuervo and Gerardo Arrubla in Sogamoso (1924). Important pieces that were exhibited to the public were the product of these excavations.
With the creation of the National Archaeological Service - founded in 1938 by Gregorio Hernández de Alba - and the National Ethnological Institute - founded in 1941 by Paul Rivet - archaeology in Colombia was definitively established and within the department various expeditions were promoted to describe the archaeological areas of the country. In this context, Gregorio Hernández de Alba highlighted the idea of considering objects as revealing documents of the culture of their creators and with this he promoted a new concept in the field of archaeological museums. Towards 1950, stratigraphic excavations, field reports and dating using the Carbon 14 method provided more reliable data on the different cultural areas of the country. It was within this context that such important processes as sedentarization, the emergence of agriculture and ceramics could be duly recorded.
In the 1960s, studies focused on excavations of the first settlers in Colombian territory, under the direction of Gonzalo Correal and Thomas van der Hammen, among others. Numerous objects resulting from these investigations, such as stone tools and bone remains dating from 10,500 to 9,000 BC, were added to the collection. In recent years, emphasis has been placed on research into environmental conditions with important results regarding soils, pollen and bone remains, contributing to further clarifying the panorama of the pre-Hispanic past. Therefore, demographic and settlement patterns, production, exchange and consumption strategies have been accurately established.
The most recent research in the northern region and in the Colombian Amazon has revealed the great antiquity of regional developments, through vestiges of very early farming villages and hunter-gatherer groups. This has enabled us to record processes of capital importance such as the domestication of plants and the emergence of ceramics.
For the reasons stated above, these collections, in addition to being witnesses to the history of pre-Hispanic societies, are testimony to the formation of anthropology as a discipline in Colombia.
The Archaeology and Heritage Division of the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History (ICANH) enriches the collections through the research it carries out in the country. Today, the archaeological collections bring together representative pieces from the different periods of settlement of the Colombian territory, ranging from hunter-gatherer groups - approximately 12,000 years ago - to the complex societies that existed upon the arrival of the Spanish. For classification and research, these collections have been divided into ceramic, stone, bone, goldsmith, and textile pieces.
The entire archaeological collection is registered and catalogued in the ISIS program, which allows for faster searches and consultations and contributes to ongoing research. In addition, ICANH is carrying out a project to incorporate the systematized information into a National Archaeology Network that will allow open consultation for students, researchers, and people interested in these collections.
In the 1940s, interest in the study and support of indigenous communities was consolidated, thanks to the foundation of the Indigenista and Etnológico Nacional Institutes - the latter annex to the Escuela Normal Superior. Under the guidance of Paul Rivet, Gregorio Hernández de Alba, and Justus Wolfran Schottelius, among many other outstanding professors, numerous pioneers carried out expeditions that covered a large part of the national territory. One of the specific objectives was to collect pieces that, in addition to definitively and exceptionally enriching the collections, would reflect the technology and material culture of that time. This fundamental step allowed ethnographic pieces to be considered as "artifacts" and thus separating them from the definitions of relics, antiquities, curiosities or indigenous works of art.
The ethnographic studies that were carried out brought to light the great diversity of indigenous communities, their forms of sociocultural organization, oral tradition, and religious life; the objects collected were eloquent testimony to this. In this way, nearly four thousand pieces of diverse nature were gathered and recorded, such as basketry, clothing, everyday and ritual attire, hunting weapons, featherwork, musical instruments, necklaces, ceramics, and tools that today make up the ethnographic collection.
During the last decades, multiple studies continue to be developed and the schools of anthropological thought are recognized in monographs that cover the great diversity of existing groups. However, the collection of material culture has ceased to be a fundamental objective and the acquisition of new pieces is increasingly less due, among other causes, to new techniques for recording information - such as audiovisual media and research carried out by and for the community itself - that allow other ways of reviewing in context the objects used by contemporary indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities.
The Art Department is in charge of the paintings, sculptures, drawings, engravings, photographs and videos in the museum's collection. The investigation of these objects emphasizes artistic narratives about the geography, nature, regions and people of Colombia. Likewise, it reveals the symbolic power of the image in the processes of religious and political domination. The collections reveal the transitions from a classical academic language towards new aesthetic expressions of national art. The interest in beauty, the encounter with plastic expression through bright color and loose brushstrokes, the search for identity in indigenism, the international projection of local artists and the development of conceptual communication accounts for the richness of this collection.
The drawing area includes works by artists and scientists: painters, sculptors, miniaturists, geographers, caricaturists and architects, through techniques such as charcoal, pencil, ink, pastel, watercolor and miniature; The latter is an important section of the collection, made up of 92 pieces. Aware of the specificity of this collection, the National Museum of Colombia created the Cabinet of Drawing and Graphic Arts and the Cabinet of Miniatures, two rooms equipped for the exhibition of this type of works, in which selected works are temporarily exhibited to make them known to the public.
The painting area is made up of easel painting, mural painting, and other formats that bring together almost 900 works.
Although the Museum was created as a complement to the School of Mining, painting had a notable presence from the very beginning. In the first systematic catalogue of the collection, published in 1881, a total of 77 works were recorded. At the beginning of the 20th century, the receipt of legacies allowed the presence of paintings to be consolidated in the collections.
Text from the Wikipedia article “National Museum of Colombia”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.