Santo Domingo Colonial Zone

About this pack

A 6-day premium trip to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, taking in Ciudad Colonial, Cathedral of Santo Domingo, Alcázar de Colón and Punta Cana beaches.

Inside the Santo Domingo Colonial Zone trip

Santo Domingo Colonial Zone opens in the Ciudad Colonial, the historic heart of the Dominican capital and the oldest continuously inhabited European-founded settlement in the Americas. First established by Bartholomew Columbus on the eastern bank of the Ozama River in the late 15th century, the settlement was relocated to the western bank after a 1502 hurricane under the leadership of Nicolás de Ovando, whose administration and that of his successor Diego Colón oversaw the first stone construction of a colonial city still largely standing today. Bounded by a walled perimeter covering just over a square kilometre, the district is threaded by Calle Las Damas, the New World's oldest paved street, laid out in 1502 and lined with landmarks including the Fortaleza Ozama and the former governors' residence, the Casa de Ovando — a UNESCO World Heritage Site whose more than 300 individual historic structures make it the principal tourist draw of modern Santo Domingo even though the city's commercial and government functions have long since moved elsewhere.

At the centre of the Colonial Zone stands the Cathedral of Santo Domingo, formally the Cathedral Basilica of Santa María la Menor and the oldest cathedral still standing in the Americas. Construction began in 1512 under the first bishop of Santo Domingo, Friar García Padilla, to a design by Alonso de Rodríguez, though work stalled and was revised twice more before the architect Alonso González, drawing inspiration from Seville Cathedral, completed the church in 1550; it was consecrated in 1541 and elevated to Metropolitan Cathedral and Primate of America in 1546 at the request of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Built in a Gothic style with ribbed vaults and a golden-tinted coral limestone façade, the cathedral was sacked in 1586 by the English privateer Sir Francis Drake during his invasion of the city, and for two centuries afterward it held the remains of Christopher Columbus, which were later moved on to Havana and finally Seville between 1795 and 1899.

A short walk away stands the Alcázar de Colón, the first fortified European palace built anywhere in the Americas, constructed between 1511 and 1514 for Diego Columbus, the explorer's eldest son, who had arrived in 1509 as governor and viceroy of the colony. Built from coralline masonry in a predominantly Gothic style with Renaissance touches in its arcades, the palace was modelled on an existing residence at Mancera de Abajo in Salamanca and once held some fifty rooms across gardens and courtyards, of which roughly half survive today; it remains the only known residence of a Columbus family member anywhere in the New World, and three generations of his descendants lived there until the late 16th century. Like the cathedral, the palace was captured and looted by Francis Drake's forces in 1586, and it fell into ruin by the mid-18th century before being restored as a museum in 1957, its collection today built around a rare 15th- to 17th-century tapestry collection from the Flemish Van Den Hecke workshop.

The trip closes with a coastal add-on at Punta Cana, a resort area in the country's easternmost region that began as an undeveloped stretch of coastline acquired in the late 1960s by the Dominican entrepreneur Frank Rainieri and the New York attorney Theodore Kheel. Their first project, a 40-room hotel called the Punta Cana Club, gave way over subsequent decades to the wider Bávaro tourism district, and the opening of Punta Cana International Airport in 1984 turned the area into the country's principal gateway for international visitors, today receiving a majority of all flights arriving in the Dominican Republic. The coastline's white sand beaches and warm turquoise water, sheltered along much of its length by natural marine pools, close out a route that has already carried the traveller through the oldest streets, cathedral and fortified palace anywhere in the hemisphere.

• Ciudad Colonial (Santo Domingo) — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Cathedral of Santo Domingo — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Alcázar de Colón — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Punta Cana — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Text adapted from the linked articles under CC BY-SA 4.0; edited for length.

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