Pasto Cultural Center

Banco de la República’s Leopoldo López Álvarez Cultural Center in Pasto is a space for exploring the region's heritage and a place for research, knowledge, and reading. The center is in constant interaction with the community of Pasto and the wider communities in the departments of Nariño and Putumayo, who enjoy the programs, activities, and information management services that the center has to offer.

The Leopoldo López Álvarez Cultural Center is recognized as a promoter of culture and education in Nariño, through three action fronts: the library, the Gold Museum and the music and visual arts program. In addition to the almost three million titles that make up the catalogue of Banco de la República’s Library Network, the library has a bibliographic selection of 62,000 physical publications. The Regional Documentation Center operates as part of the library as well, a repository of the documentary heritage of the region. It contains 2,260 items on the department of Nariño, including books, audiovisual files, and sound records, in addition to some titles from the private collections of distinguished writers from Nariño such as Ignacio Rodriguez Guerrero, Alberto Montezuma Hurtado, Emiliano Diaz del Castillo, and scholar Leopoldo Lopez Alvarez.

Through the music and visual arts program, the Cultural Center offers the community of Nariño a wide selection of anthropological and art exhibitions. In addition, its music room and auditorium provide a constant program of concerts, workshops, and conferences. For its part, the Nariño Gold Museum preserves the legacy of the indigenous cultures that occupied the lands of the department some 2,500 years ago, recognizing ancestral memory through its collection of ceramics and goldwork, with the aim of generating processes of conservation, research, analysis, and dissemination of cultural heritage.

History

The Pasto Cultural Center owes its name to the most prominent intellectual in Nariño’s history, Leopoldo López Álvarez (1891-1940), a renowned lawyer and professor who became famous for translating The Aeneid, Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics; Homer’s Iliad, Odyssey, and Hymns, the Seven Tragedies of Aeschylus, and the comedies of Aristophanes into Spanish from Greek and Latin. He also founded the Bulletin of Historical Studies of the Nariño Academy of History. In 1939, López Álvarez was the first person from Nariño to be decorated by the Colombian government with the Boyacá Cross, recognizing his cultural contributions to the country.

Banco de la República officially inaugurated the Cultural Center on October 19, 1984. The building, built on the land formerly occupied by the city's central market square, was the central bank’s contribution to the architectural renovation that the city undertook in the 1980s. The building was recognized by the Pasto mayor with the City of Pasto civic medal and is known among the population as one of the most emblematic places in the regional capital.

In recent years, as part of its policy of cultural decentralization, the Banco de la República has moved into different parts of the region with its programs and services and is increasingly serving the population in its diversity. It has also generated inter-institutional projects with public and private agencies through which it has positively influenced the cultural development of the region. For over three decades of uninterrupted work, citizens have been able to appreciate hundreds of art and archeology exhibitions and chamber music recitals offered by national and international ensembles and soloists. Audiences have also been able to participate in numerous reading promotion programs and enjoy the Nariño Gold Museum, the library, and the Regional Documentation Center.