Founder’s HouseCasa del Fundador Gonzalo Suárez Rendón

Founder’s House is tied to Tunja’s birth in 1539, when conquistador Gonzalo Suárez Rendón established a residence for the new colonial elite. Around its sober courtyard, c. 1590 painted ceilings and mural fragments unfold Mannerist grotesques, IHS emblems, hunting scenes, and imagined beasts—some recalling Dürer’s Rhinoceros —using art to perform piety, lineage, and a claimed command of unfamiliar nature. The house endures as a rare witness to early domestic power in colonial Colombia.