05The story

Santo Domingo architecture

Stone of the Colonial City

Santo Domingo’s colonial quarter covers 106 hectares of one- and two-storey streets and buildings of stone, brick and earth, keeping its early sixteenth-century grid inside walls and towers. The Alcázar de Colón presents a Gothic façade with Renaissance touches; built between 1511 and 1514 as a fortified Colón family palace, it was restored in the twentieth century as a museum with period rooms. Fortaleza Ozama is a military stone mass at the river mouth, raised from 1502 and finished around 1508, among the oldest surviving European military works in the Americas. The Cathedral of Santa María la Menor shows a façade of golden coral stone; building began in 1504 and finished in 1550, making it the oldest standing cathedral in the Americas. Visit palaces and museums in the morning, walk slowly between Calle de las Damas and Plaza de España, and notice how narrow the streets feel beside the modern avenues beyond the old walls.

0 hectares

Site area

1514

Alcázar roughly completed