fuenmayorr568

· 16 Jul 2021

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The retainer of bella vista

#history
This is a work with a unique style in the city, located between avenues 3 and 4 (Bella Vista) next to La Cañada Nueva, in the La Mucura sector of the pavement. It was built in 1894 by order of Muñoz Tebar to be the city prison, his brother being engineer Dr. Luis Muñoz Tebar, in charge of directing the general works and Antonio Avila for masonry, while Luis Font made the sculpture works . Its structure inspired by Egyptian pharaonic funerary architecture make it stand out from the rest of the city's buildings. The façade is framed by two towers in the form of a quadrangular pyramid 11 meters high, with an effigy of pharaoh attached in the central part of each of them, where there were buildings of the prison and six eclectic style columns at the entrance supporting a terrace, is surrounded by walls 7 meters high and 80 centimeters of thickness and its interior consisting of a central courtyard where 20 cylindrical columns of the same style that separates the two wings from the place, one for administrative area and one for cells are raised. During the 1930s, during the administration of Pérez Soto, it underwent some internal modifications to adapt it to the growing number of detainees and in the dictatorship of Pérez Jiménez he was a political prison. It functioned as a prison until 1958 and then became a police checkpoint until 1988 when the 400 detainees left there were transferred to the Marite. In 1990 it became the Museum of Bagpipes and Folklore in Zulia State, but in 1996 a fire destroyed its interior. In 2013 the façade was restored but the interior remains abandoned.