In 1724, the Crespo family of Cochabamba donated land to the church. In 1753, a royal decree from the king of Spain authorized Archbishop Molleda to found a convent on that land, to be entered by young women of privilege and nobility. Seven years later, four nuns arrived from Sucre to start the convent.
To house them, the Italian architect Santiago Cambiazzo designed a bold, elliptically-shaped building, the only such Italian style, poly-lobed foundation in all of Latin America. Cambiazzo’s daring design proved too ambitious for the technology of the period, and he was unable to erect a roof for his curving, baroque walls.
Although a temporary building had been erected to house the nuns, the sisters of the new convent were without a church, until the bishop Antonio de San Alberto and a local architect from nearby Tarata proposed a solution: to build a second church within the walls of the first.
Thus was the Convent of Santa Teresa’s whimsical structure conceived; it remains a bold creation that defies the passage of time and looks toward the future.