Santo Domingo still holds the Americas' oldest European street grid
Santo Domingo de Guzmán, Dominican capital and Caribbean's largest metro, counted 1,029,110 in the city center (2022). Spanish settlers laid it out in 1496 as the New World's first colonial capital seat, home to early university, cathedral, and fortress institutions that other cities later copied.
Before 1492 the Taíno called their island Kiskeya, mother of all lands, and Ayiti, land of high mountains, and divided it among five chiefdoms led by caciques including Guacanagarix, Caonabo and Guarionex. Bartholomew Columbus founded the settlement as La Nueva Isabela, and in 1495 it took the name of Saint Dominic. It became the springboard for Ponce de León in Puerto Rico, Velázquez in Cuba and Cortés in Mexico. A hurricane flattened it in June 1502, and Governor Nicolás de Ovando rebuilt it across the Ozama River on the layout that survives in the walled Colonial Zone.
Colonial institutions arrived early. Diego Columbus came as viceroy in 1509, King Ferdinand set up an appeals court in 1512, and the Laws of Burgos reached the island in 1514. In 1521 enslaved Africans on Diego Columbus's sugar estate staged the first major slave revolt in the Americas. Francis Drake seized the city for ransom in 1586, a blow that marked the start of Spain's decline on Hispaniola.
Sovereignty then changed with dizzying speed. Spain ceded the colony to France in 1795; Haitian rebels took the city in 1801, France recovered it the next year, a Haitian invasion failed in 1805, and Spain returned in 1809. In 1821 José Núñez de Cáceres proclaimed the Republic of Spanish Haiti, annexed by Haiti two months later. Independence under Juan Pablo Duarte came on 27 February 1844; the dictator Pedro Santana handed the country back to Spain in 1861, and Isabella II withdrew her troops in 1865 after the Restoration War.
The twentieth century was hard. American forces occupied the city in 1916 and again in 1965, after the elected president Juan Bosch was toppled and Francisco Caamaño's Constitutionalists fought to restore him. Hurricane San Zenón killed up to 8,000 people in 1930, and Rafael Trujillo renamed the capital after himself from 1936 until his assassination in 1961.
Source: Santo Domingo
