Bogotá’s Museo de Memoria de Colombia is moving again, but its long-delayed future now sits inside a shifting political landscape.
After more than three years on hold, construction resumed in March 2026 on the museum, which is intended to confront Colombia’s internal armed conflict and honor victims of violence that has shaped the country for more than seven decades. The building was more than 70% complete when work restarted, following new funding secured in 2025. The project is expected to open in part in 2027 and be completed by 2029.
The museum depends on the Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica (CNMH), the government agency responsible for historical memory. That link has become newly sensitive after the narrow election victory of Abelardo de la Espriella, a right-wing lawyer who will take office on 7 August. Although he has not spoken directly about the museum, his campaign emphasized a hardline security agenda, an end to peace negotiations, and a smaller state. Human-rights groups have warned that such policies could weaken or merge institutions tied to peace, victims’ rights, and memory.
The CNMH called the project’s continuation “a significant development for the country” in a statement issued on 6 March, adding that “truth, memory and the dignity of the victims are central to the nation’s democratic life.”
The museum’s origins lie in the 2011 Victims and Land Restitution Law, which charged the CNMH with creating a space for victims of the armed conflict. The 2016 peace agreement with the Farc reinforced that mandate, underscoring the role of symbolic reparation in Colombia’s postwar landscape.
The project has been repeatedly delayed by contractual disputes, legal battles, and funding shortages. In 2020, the building contract was awarded to the Spanish firm OHLA, also known as Obrascón Huarte Lain, with an initial investment of nearly $16 million. The museum had originally been scheduled to open in October 2022, but the contract expired that year with only half the building finished. A breach-of-contract dispute followed, along with multimillion-dollar lawsuits between the company and the government, pushing costs higher.
Located on Avenida El Dorado, or Calle 26, the museum occupies a prominent corridor linking Bogotá’s historic center to the airport. For supporters, its unfinished shell has long symbolized both the difficulty and the necessity of building public memory in a country where the conflict remains unresolved. The question now is whether the renewed construction can outlast the political uncertainty gathering around it.
