Santo Domingo was the first permanent European city in the Americas, founded in 1498, and its Colonial Zone has been World Heritage since 1990. Here stand the first cathedral, the first hospital, the first university and the first paved street in the Americas — an accumulation of firsts the city displays with justification.
The Primada Cathedral
The Catedral Primada de América, completed in 1541, combines late Gothic with Renaissance and baroque elements. It is austere outside and surprisingly bright within, with side chapels that served as burial places for the founding families. Opposite, Parque Colón is the neighbourhood's meeting point.
The Alcázar and Plaza España
The Alcázar de Colón was the residence of Diego Columbus, the admiral's son and viceroy of the Indies, built around 1512 without a single nail. It is now a museum of sixteenth and seventeenth-century furniture and tapestries, and its arched façade above Plaza España is the city's most recognisable image. The square fills at dusk and is lined with restaurants in the former Reales Atarazanas.
Calle las Damas
Calle las Damas is the first paved street on the continent and concentrates sixteenth-century buildings: the Casa de Bastidas, the Panteón Nacional — a former Jesuit church turned mausoleum of national heroes, with a permanent guard — and the Museo de las Casas Reales, once the seat of the audiencia and now a decent explanation of the colonial period.
Its name comes from the ladies of the court of María de Toledo, Diego Columbus's wife, who walked it at dusk.
Beyond the old town
East of the Ozama river stands the Faro a Colón, a monumental cross laid flat, opened in 1992, which projects a cross of light into the sky. It is controversial for its cost and for what was demolished to build it, and worth seeing for that reason alone.
Los Tres Ojos are a system of crystalline lagoons inside limestone caves within the Mirador del Este park. And the Malecón, the coastal avenue, comes alive at weekends.
Practical
The Colonial Zone is walkable in a full day, though it deserves two. It is safe day and night on the main streets; keep normal precautions in less lit areas. Staying inside the old town, in one of the boutique hotels installed in colonial mansions, changes the experience of the city entirely.
A historical note
Santo Domingo was the first capital of the Spanish empire in America, and the expeditions that led to the conquest of Mexico and Peru departed from here. Cortés, Ponce de León and Balboa all passed through these streets before sailing. That role as a point of departure explains the density of foundational buildings in so few blocks.