The Iglesia de Santa Capilla, one block north of Plaza Bolívar, is a small but striking neo-Gothic church commissioned by President Antonio Guzmán Blanco in 1883 — a deliberate copy of the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, transposed to a Caribbean colonial setting. The interior is intimate: a single high nave, slender ribbed vaults, and a wall of stained-glass windows depicting episodes from the life of Christ.
The site was where the first mass in Caracas was reputedly said in 1567. The current building replaced an earlier chapel that had stood there for three centuries. Open intermittently; the interior is one of the most surprising spaces in the colonial centre.