A building in Cesar Augusto Fonseca Ospina “Small Bethlehem.”

Cesar Augusto Fonseca Ospina, Artisan

I was searching for interesting images of large dollhouses on the Internet and spotted this great picture. I thought it to be some sort of multi-story Tudor house. It turned out to be the work of Cesar Augusto Fonseca Ospina, a miniature artisan living in the town of Pacho, Colombia, 55 miles north of Bogota, on the western slope of the Andes Mountains. At 7,008 feet elevation, the air is rarified. So is Cesar’s beautiful work.

Cesar’s Facebook page is El Taller Belenista de Cesar. A machine translation is “Cesar’s Nativity Workshop,” and his Timeline lives up to the title. The page has a subtitle too, which translates to New Videos Wednesdays and/or Sundays.

Cesar has built what he calls a “small Bethlehem,” complete with many of the miniature humans and objects one would expect to find. There are photographs in sequence on the making of many of these figures; how-to videos as well.

El Taller Belenista de Cesar is in Spanish, of course. The Facebook timeline translations work well. As for translating the many videos, there are a number of “video translation apps” available on the Internet. Use that long-tail keyword phrase in your browser and take your pick.

In the good old days, before the Internet, the odds are we might only know of Cesar’s work if we lived in Pacho or one of the neighboring villages. So hurray for technology! We can learn of great miniatures and the artisans creating them, no matter where they live.

Thank you, Cesar, for showing us your “small Bethlehem.”

Susan Downing, with Patrick Owens

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I invite you to visit my Etsy Shop where I offer many accessories and pieces of furniture in 1:12 scale.