The Ermita de Jesús Nazareno is the oldest standing church in Popayán, founded just nine years after the city itself. A small, single-nave building with whitewashed walls and a low bell tower; the simplicity is the point — this is what colonial churches looked like before gold and ambition turned them into baroque set-pieces.
Inside, fragments of 16th-century murals survive beneath later paint, partly uncovered during restoration after the 1983 earthquake. Open occasionally for services and small concerts.