Colonial City of Santo Domingo

The Americas' colonial story begins in the streets of Santo Domingo. Founded in 1498, only six years after Christopher Columbus reached the island, the city saw the hemisphere's first cathedral, first hospital and first university rise within its walls, and its chessboard street plan became the template copied across Spanish America. The Colonial City, with its early 16th-century monuments facing the Ozama River, was inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1990.