The Lord of Monserrate. The image of the Fallen Lord of Monserrate, the work of the Santafereño Pedro de Lugo and Albarracín, whom Father Bernardino Rojas commissioned to sculpt the statue in pieces of iron and wood, and who very compliantly gave it. The Fallen Lord initially remained in the sacristy of the temple. From where later - for causes that have not been established - was transferred to the major altar, that until then occupied the brunette and miraculous Virgin of Monserrat. The change in no way altered the enthusiasm in the contours of the hill and in Santa Fe itself, where there were no shortage of obelisks to support the work of the bachelor Pedro Solis de Valenzuela and that of the virtuous father Rojas.
They lived what was necessary to contemplate the growth of the Catholic faith in the hill, which, in the course of time, in 1660, was delivered to the wise rectory of the fathers of the Society of Jesus. For more than a century the Jesuits, with the same love and dynamism of their predecessors, celebrated masses, sang rosaries and encouraged parties that were to take root in the Christian spirit for long generations.
Thus, growing by its own ecclesiastical means, fortunately resisting the clash of several earthquakes, and serving as strategic scenario to the wars of Independence, the monastery of the Lord of Monserrate drew the long and sometimes painful course of the centuries, until the beginning of 1900, popular devotion had extended to the most remote towns of the capital. And these dimensions of faith determined that the primitive church was unable to accommodate the growing number of sunday pilgrims who were going to lay their prayers at the feet of God. Circumstance that led to the then chaplain Gregorio Nacianceno Ocampo to ask permission to the most excellent archbishop Herrera Restrepo, to raise a temple just to the human movement of the time. Indeed, on the day of the Holy Cross of 1915 began the works that would point out another miraculous stage of the existence of the Sanctuary.
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