Bogotá Sights

Museo Histórico Policia

#6 of 172 things to do in Bogotá

#5 of 506 museum sights in South America

1 reviews | Write a review

  • Address
    • Calle 9 No 9-27
  • Phone
    • 01 233 5911
  • Price
    • admission free
  • Hours
    • 8am-5pm Tue-Sun

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Lonely Planet review for Museo Histórico Policia

The surprisingly worthwhile Museo Histórico Policia not only gets you inside the lovely ex-HQ (built in 1923) of Bogotá’s police force, but gives you 45 minutes or so of contact time with 18-year-old, English-speaking local guides who are serving a one-year compulsory service with the police (interesting tales to be heard). The best parts otherwise follow cocaine-kingpin Pablo Escobar’s demise in 1993 – with a model dummy of his bullet-ridden corpse – or the surreal juxtaposition of a Neanderthal-fight mural before cases and cases of more modern means of killing each other (pistols and rifles).

 

Traveller reviews for Museo Histórico Policia (1)

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    A bit of history, some guns and a delightful young guide

    doraw recommends this,

    On arriving in Colombia with only a few hours to see the capital before a flight to Cartagena, I had one explicit recommendation from a friend: "Go to the police museum - it's brilliantly gruesome." Always up for a bit of horror (even at 8am), I went straight there from the airport. To be fair, there are quite a number of rather missable rooms here (of the uniforms, medals and flags variety), but my visit still left a lasting impression on me. Highlights for gore-lovers would be the firearms room, with its collection of police-seized home-made and home-doctored guns offering a chilling insight into Colombia's difficult history, and the Pablo Escobar story in the basement illustrated as it is with some painfully unforgiving police photography. The best part for me, however, was being accompanied by one of the police cadets who direct the tours for English-speakers (the information panels are in Spanish): resolutely polite, giving the odd smirking glance to his mates on the stairs, he made for a surprisingly charming guide. Before the tour, you are offered a hot drink. As a first experience of a country, sipping scalding coffee while making broken conversation with a uniformed and slightly shy teenager was definitely unusual, but it was also quite lovely.

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